Design of a Multi-Beam Switching Antenna Loaded with a Square Metasurface

Multi-beam and beam-scanning antennas enable extensive communication coverage while mitigating multipath fading and enhancing spectrum utilization efficiency. This paper presents a transmissive metasurface antenna design, which utilizes a microstrip square-ring patch antenna with four feed ports as the excitation source. A 7 × 7 square patch metasurface is positioned above the feed source, facilitating the generation of four independently steerable beams by switching activation among the four feed ports. Operating at 12.6 GHz, the antenna achieves a gain of 10.4 dB. The 3 dB beamwidth of the beams from all four ports exceeds 23°. The proposed design offers advantages of structural simplicity, low profile, and cost-effectiveness. By leveraging transmissive metasurfaces, this approach combines the benefits of low profile and low cost with flexible manipulation of electromagnetic wave radiation, thereby providing a novel methodology for designing multi-beam communication antennas.