Volume 68, Issue 7-8

A helical antenna that is printed on a layered dielectric hemisphere has been studied when a parasitic helical wire is incorporated in the structure. Experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that the 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth can be enhanced by approximately 100% for optimized length and position of the parasitic wire. The analysis has been implemented using the method of moments (MoM), and good agreement has been achieved between computations and measurements.

In this paper, a novel broadband CPW-fed circularly polarized (CP) monopole antenna is presented. The antenna is composed of a falcate-shaped patch and an improved ground plane. By adding an I-shaped stub in the ground plane, the impedance and axial-ratio (AR) bandwidths can be greatly enhanced. The antenna has been fabricated and measured. Good agreement is achieved between the simulation and measurement, which shows that the proposed antenna covers a 10-dB impedance bandwidth of 122% from 2.78 to 11.46 GHz, and a 3-dB AR bandwidth of 53.3% from 4.4 to 7.6 GHz.

A novel lowpass filter with wide stopband and sharp skirt characteristics is proposed. To obtain the applicable lowpass filter, several cells of coupled T-shaped resonator, U-shape and dumbbell-shaped resonators are connected in series. The proposed filter has low insertion loss, high return loss in the passband and wide stopband. The transition band is from 3.18 to 3.29 GHz with −3 and −20 dB, respectively. Results of the fabricated filter exhibit a roll-off and relative stopband bandwidth of 217 and 137%, respectively. Measurement and simulation results show good agreement.

In this paper, a miniaturized branch-line coupler with harmonic suppression is presented. Approximately 80% size reduction in comparison with the conventional branch-line coupler is achieved using the step impedance bent transmission line, loaded by in-line beeline structure. Experimental result shows more than 24 dB suppression for primary odd harmonics (3rd, 5th, and 7th). The measured relative low insertion loss (3.2 dB) and desired coupling (3.1 dB) as well as 89.7° phase difference between through and coupled ports for the center frequency are verified.

In traveling-wave tubes (TWTs), coaxial couplers or window assemblies are used for coupling milliwatt (mW) to hundreds of watts of average power. For the proper transformation of impedance of interaction structure to the standard connector, coaxial couplers are suitably modeled as multi-section coaxial transformer. Due to high average power propagation, center conductor of coupler gets heated and the dimensions of multi-section coupler get deformed from its cold condition which causes impedance mismatch and increase of thermal load. Due to impedance mismatch, reflection of RF signal occurs from the couplers causing oscillation and finally leads of destruction of the TWT. This paper presents the thermal and structural analysis of coaxial coupler to quantify the temperature distribution at different regions, deformation of cold dimensions and stress due to material property of window disc.

The electromagnetic scattering of a conducting sphere coated with chiral metamaterials is formulated in terms of Mie series method. Field decomposition scheme is implemented to split electromagnetic wave in chiral metamaterials into a right-handed circularly polarized wave and a left-handed circularly polarized wave. By applying the continuous boundary condition on the interfaces of the two-layer sphere, the expanded coefficients for the scattered fields are obtained by solving the electromagnetic wave in the spherical harmonics vector function. The validity of theoretical formulations and program is verified by reference results. The co-polarized and cross-polarized radar cross scattering of a conducting sphere coated with double-negative, single-negative chiral metamaterials compared to normal media and chiral media are investigated.

Dedicated field portable radars have been used to measure the reflectivity of identified deciduous and coniferous trees at C to Ka frequency bands with perpendicular illumination. Actual test radars, their electrical parameters including antennas and calibration devices are described. First results show summer time reflectivities from −30 to −10 dB (m 2 /m 2 ) for deciduous trees and from −30 to 0 dB ( 2 /m 2 ) for coniferous samples, depending on frequency band. Late autumn and spring measurements show particularly well in Ka-band the absence of leaves. Variations in histogram detail, from one frequency to another, exceed 10 dB despite the cumulative probabilities for all bands are quite similar. The measured power spectral density of deciduous trees in the spring was typically 20 dB/Hz at X-band and 30 dB/Hz in Ka-band. Midsummer tests gave values close to 15 and 25 dB/Hz.

In this paper, the performance of beamforming (BF) for a dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) relay network, where the source and destination are each equipped with multiple antennas, is investigated. It is assumed that the source-relay and relay-destination channels experience mixed fading distributions, namely, correlated Nakagami-m/Rician and correlated Rician/Nakagami-m, respectively. By considering fixed-gain relaying, analytical expressions for outage probability (OP) and average symbol error rate (ASER) are derived in closed-form. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of our performance analysis, also illustrate the impact of channel correlation, fading severity, Rician factor and antenna configuration on the performance of the system. It is shown that the correlated Nakagami-m/Rician fading channel can achieve better performance than the correlated Rician/Nakagami-m fading channel with the increase of fading severity parameter, and the correlated Rician/Nakagami-m fading channel may outperform the correlated Nakagami-m/Rician fading channel by enlarging the Rician factor.

In order to realize the notion of “anytime, anywhere” communication for high-speed train passengers, the Long Term Evolution for Railway is designed to provide broadband accesses and reliable communications for high-speed train passengers. However, with the increase of train speed, the system is subject to high bit error rate, Doppler frequency shift, and call drops. This paper is trying to solve these problems by employing the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output technique and access control schemes. The goal is to provide higher quality of services such as data rate, reliability, and delay for train passengers. Physical layer performance analysis and access control schemes are proposed in a two-hop model. Handovers and service types are also considered. Simulation results show that proposed models and schemes perform better in improving the quality of services.

Due to the distributed nature, cooperative networks are generally subject to multiple carrier frequency offsets (MCFOs), which make the channels time-varying and drastically degrade the system performance. In this paper, to address the MCFOs problem in detect-andforward (DetF) multi-relay cooperative networks, a robust relay selection (RS) based double-differential (DD) transmission scheme, termed RSDDT, is proposed, where the best relay is selected to forward the source's double-differentially modulated signals to the destination with the DetF protocol. The proposed RSDDT scheme can achieve excellent performance over fading channels in the presence of unknown MCFOs. Considering double-differential multiple phase-shift keying (DDMPSK) is applied, we first derive exact expressions for the outage probability and average bit error rate (BER) of the RSDDT scheme. Then, we look into the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime and present simple and informative asymptotic outage probability and average BER expressions, which reveal that the proposed scheme can achieve full diversity. Moreover, to further improve the BER performance of the RSDDT scheme, we investigate the optimum power allocation strategy among the source and the relay nodes, and simple analytical solutions are obtained. Numerical results are provided to corroborate the derived analytical expressions and it is demonstrated that the proposed optimum power allocation strategy offers substantial BER performance improvement over the equal power allocation strategy.

As the development of autonomous radio in deep space network, it is possible to actualize communication between explorers, aircrafts, rovers and satellites, e.g. from different countries, adopting different signal modes. The first mission to enforce the autonomous radio is to detect signals of the explorer autonomously without disturbing the original communication. This paper develops a collaborative wideband compressed signal detection approach for InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet where there exist sparse active signals in the deep space environment. Compressed sensing (CS) can be utilized by exploiting the sparsity of IPN Internet communication signal, whose useful frequency support occupies only a small portion of an entirely wide spectrum. An estimate of the signal spectrum can be obtained by using reconstruction algorithms. Against deep space shadowing and channel fading, multiple satellites collaboratively sense and make a final decision according to certain fusion rule to gain spatial diversity. A couple of novel discrete cosine transform (DCT) and walsh-hadamard transform (WHT) based compressed spectrum detection methods are proposed which significantly improve the performance of spectrum recovery and signal detection. Finally, extensive simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed collaborative scheme for signal detection in IPN Internet. Compared with the conventional discrete fourier transform (DFT) based method, our DCT and WHT based methods reduce computational complexity, decrease processing time, save energy and enhance probability of detection.