Investigation of complexity-constrained peformance of planar reconfigurable aperture antennas (RECAPs)

A 1λ x 1λ circular planar RECAP structure was analyzed for beamforming performance with respect to constrained complexity, in terms of the number of reconfigurable ports N_RP and allowed reconfigurable states per port N_RS. It was found that diminishing returns of the structure occurred near N_RP = 64 reconfigurable ports. Also, increasing the reconfigurable states per port appears to partially compensate for a limited number of ports. Although the structure considered in this work is somewhat idealized, future work will consider more practical RECAP structures that include loss and biasing effects, as well as other applications, such as null-steering and three-dimensional pattern synthesis.