Gain and bandwidth enhanced patch antenna with phase compensation metasurface

This paper presents a novel thin transparent metasurface design which is employed for compensating the out-of-phase radiation from a conventional microstrip patch antenna. Such metasurface mounted on a patch antenna has the ability to transform a primary radiation with spherical-like phase profile into an in-phase planar one. Radiation pattern of the primary source is squeezed into a narrow beam with suppressed side-lobes, thus a patch antenna with enhanced gain performance can be achieved. Due to the strong near-field coupling, the impedance matching bandwidth has been enhanced as well. With operational frequency band set around 5.7 GHz, the proposed antenna has a potential application in wireless communication systems especially for point-to-point data transmission. A prototype of the patch antenna with metasurface superstrate is fabricated and experimentally tested comparing with a conventional patch antenna to validate the simulated analysis, which demonstrates a 3 dB gain enhancement and a doubled impedance bandwidth.