ENDFIRE ANTENNA BASED ON SPOOF SURFACE PLASMON POLARITONS

We proposed an efficient method to radiate the spoof surface plasmon polaritons (sspps) to the endfire direction, which added two parasitic strips as directors in front of the dipole antenna fed by the sspps structure. The directors were used to enhance the endfire radiation due to its beam modified function. Both simulated and measured results suggest good performance of the proposed antenna in a narrow band from 6.5 to 6.9 GHz with about 7.5 dBi realized gain and a 5 dBi increase in the endfire direction at the center frequency of 6.8 GHz reference to the unloaded structure. Also, the surface electric field distributions of the unloaded and loaded sspps antenna were studied to verify the gain enhancement in the endfire direction in physical perspective. Our work tends to have better performance than other related work, such as broader bandwidth and higher realized gain with even greatly simplified design process. The proposed sspps antenna has potential applications in planer integrated circuits and communication systems.