The intensive research in the fifth generation (5G) technology is a clear indication of technological revolution to meet the ever-increasing demand and needs for high speed communication as well as Internet of Thing (IoT) based applications. The timely upgradation in 5G technology standards is released by third generation partnership project (3GPP) which enables the researchers to refine the research objectives and contribute towards the development. The 5G technology will be supported by not only smartphones but also different IoT devices to provide different services like smart building, smart city, and many more which will require a 5G antenna with low latency, low path loss, and stable radiation pattern. This paper provides a comprehensive study of different antenna designs considering various 5G antenna design aspects like compactness, efficiency, isolation, etc. This review paper elaborates the state-of-the-art research on the different types of antennas with their performance enhancement techniques for 5G technology in recent years. Also, this paper precisely covers 5G specifications and categorization of antennas followed by a comparative analysis of different antenna designs. Till now, many 5G antenna designs have been proposed by the different researchers, but an exhaustive review of different types of 5G antenna with their performance enhancement method is not yet done. So, in this paper, we have attempted to explore the different types of 5G antenna designs, their performance enhancement techniques, comparison, and future breakthroughs in a holistic way.

The increasing proliferation of advanced devices for UWB, 5G communication, micrometerwave, and millimeter-wave communication demands an antenna which can handle huge data rates, provides high gain and stable radiation pattern as a panacea of most of the current wireless communication problems. Many different antenna designs have been proposed by the researchers but, Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA) has drawn the attention of most of the researchers because of its high gain, wide bandwidth, less radiation loss, and stable radiation pattern. Different methods are presented to make AVA more compact while maintaining the performance of an antenna to an acceptable level. These different methods are substrate choice, flare shape, slots, and feeding connectors. Also, AVA performance can be enhanced by incorporating corrugation, dielectric lens, patch in between two flares of AVA, balanced AVA (BAVA), metamaterial, computational intelligence (CI), and AVA array. The AVA performance enhancement techniques modify the electrical and physical properties of an antenna which in turn improves its performance. A large number of performance enhancement methods of AVA design have been proposed, however, no comprehensive study exists to categorize these performance enhancement techniques and outline their concepts, advantages, disadvantages, and applications. So, in this paper, we have attempted to outline all methods available for enhancing and optimizing the parameters of AVA. Additionally, to validate some of the important performance enhancement methods, they are incorporated in the basic conventional AVA design and further simulation results are obtained for the same which are in line with the surveyed literature. Each method is explained in detail by incorporating its key points, merits, and demerits. Moreover, illustrations from the literature are given to demonstrate improvement in the parameters as a result of applying a particular performance enhancement technique.

This paper presents a compact 1 × 4 antipodal Vivaldi antenna (AVA) array for 5G millimeter-wave applications. The designed antenna operates over 24.19 GHz–29.15 GHz and 30.28 GHz–40.47 GHz frequency ranges. The proposed antenna provides a high gain of 8 dBi to 13.2 dBi and the highest gain is obtained at 40.3 GHz. The proposed antenna operates on frequency range-2 (FR2) and covers n257, n258, n260, and n261 frequency bands of 5G communication. The corrugations and RT/Duroid 5880 substrate are used to reduce the antenna size to 24 mm × 28.8 mm × 0.254 mm, which makes the antenna highly compact. Furthermore, the corrugations play an important role in the front-to-back ratio improvement, which further enhances the gain of the antenna. The corporate feeding is optimized meticulously to obtain an enhanced bandwidth and narrow beamwidth. The radiation pattern does not vary over the desired operating frequency range. In addition, the experimental results of the fabricated antenna coincide with the simulated results. The presented antenna design shows a substantial improvement in size, gain, and bandwidth when compared to what has been reported for an AVA with nearly the same size, which makes the proposed antenna one of the best candidates for application in devices that operate in the millimeter frequency range.