Metamaterial-Enabled Beam-Steering Antenna Architecture for Terahertz UAV Networks in Dynamic Air-to-Ground Environments

Abstract

Larger-scale deployment of small drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) in future wireless networks requires high-capacity, low-latency communication infrastructure that can support the unsteady aerial conditions. Ultra-wide bandwidth and high data rate at the THz frequency bands have been expected to be one of the promising frontiers of 6G UAV communications. But the strong atmospheric absorption and directional radiating requirements at the THz frequencies are major issues when it comes to deploying strong and efficient UAV-to-ground and UAV-to-UAV communications. A new reconfigurable beam positioning antenna architecture is proposed in this paper having metamaterial surfaces optimized to communicate network of UAVs in the THz band. The design involves electronically controllable phase responses where the unit cells are tunable, thus providing agile and continuous steering of the beam through electronic controls instead of mechanical movement. The 2D array of metamaterials is a simulation-optimized model that works at 300 GHz. The validation shows that the antenna has a broad steering angle of -45O to +45 O, and a high gain of 22.3 dBi with a side lobe level of -15 dB all by means of simulation. It is lightweight and has a low-profile structure, which is an advantage that it can be very useful in smaller UAVs. The suggested architecture is tested using practical conditions of the UAV mobility and the different geometrical conditions of the links. The beam reconfiguration latency, radiation performance, and atmospherics propagation loss are all fully analyzed to define the viability of the system at the system level. The findings show that the metamaterial-based antenna would greatly enhance both the link robustness and the spectral efficiency of THz UAV networks, more so in highly dynamic air-to-ground scenarios of communications. The paper can inform the increasing pool of studies regarding adaptive and intelligent antenna systems in the 6G wireless infrastructure and also it is an opportunity to see future perspective where metamaterials can be used to enable small, lightweight, leading to new forms of directional antennas in UAV.