The Design of a Circularly Polarized Antenna Array with Flat-Top Beam for an Electronic Toll Collection System

Electronic toll collection (ETC), known as a non-stop toll collection system which can automatically realize payment by setting the identification antenna at the entrance, is always suffering from information exchange interruption caused by beam switching. A circularly polarized sector beam antenna array operating at 5.8 GHz with flat-top coverage is proposed, based on the weighted constrained method of the maximum power transmission efficiency (WCMMPTE). By setting the test receiving antennas at the specific angles of the ETC antenna array to be designed, constraints on the received power are introduced to control the radiation pattern and obtain the optimized distribution of excitations for antenna elements. A 1-to-16 feeding network, based on the microstrip transmission line theory is designed to feed a 4 × 4 antenna array. Simulation results show that the half-power beamwidth covers an angular range of -30° to 30° while the axial ratio is below 3dB, which meets the ETC requirements. Furthermore, the gain fluctuation among the needed range of -30° to 30° is lower than 0.7 dB, which is suitable for the ETC system to achieve a stable signal strength and uninterrupted communication.