Reconfigurable Antenna for Simultaneous Multi-Service Wireless Applications

Extensive efforts are currently underway to develop universal wireless receivers to address multi-band, multi-service, and multi-standard operation. There are four options for the design of the associated antennas. Reconfigurable antennas, however, would have potential in providing such great versatility, offering a compact size, low cost, and high performance. Nevertheless, they have certain limitations, including the presence of higher order resonances (spurious resonances) and the need to simultaneously serve multiple services at the same time, but these impediments can be easily circumvented. Relatively wide band filters could follow/cascade these reconfigurable antennas to eliminate any spurious higher order resonances and block out their associated added noise. The use of these filters typically adds minimal insertion loss, but they would drastically reduce the stringent requirements of the currently used expensive RF front-end filters. The use of reconfigurable antennas developed for switchable services can be extended to allow mixed services (i.e. providing more than one service at one time)