Narrow beam width, higher gain and multibeam characteristics are demanded in 5G technology. Array antennas that are utilized in the existing mobile base stations have many drawbacks when operating at upper 5G frequency bands. For example, due to the high frequency operation, the antenna elements become smaller and thus, in order to provide higher gain, more antenna elements and arrays are required, which will cause the feeding network design to be more complex. The lens antenna is one of the potential candidates to replace the current structure in mobile base station. Therefore, a negative refractive index shaped lens is proposed to provide high gain and narrow beamwidth using energy conservation and Abbe’s sine principle. The aim of this study is to investigate the multibeam characteristics of a negative refractive index shaped lens in mobile base station applications. In this paper, the feed positions for the multibeam are selected on the circle from the center of the lens and the accuracy of the feed position is validated through Electromagnetic (EM) simulation. Based on the analysis performed in this study, a negative refractive index shaped lens with a smaller radius and slender lens than the conventional lens is designed, with the additional capability of performing wide-angle beam scanning.

Lens antennas with multibeam, high gain, and low sidelobe level are potential candidates for base station antennas in 5G mobile communication. In this paper, the authors perform simulation and parametric analysis of a lens antenna with positive and negative refractive indexes (NRI) using the modern electromagnetic field simulation software ANSYS HFSS. The simulation results of structures and theoretical calculations are analyzed and compared. The simulation results show the effectiveness of using negative refractive index lens antennas to minimize the dimension. The lens thickness with a negative refractive index decreased from 24.5 mm to 6.1 mm compared to the positive refractive index lens’s thickness. The results also indicate the similarities in gain, sidelobe level, amplitude, and electric field distribution on the aperture plane of the negative and positive refractive indexes (PRI) lens antennas compared to the theoretical calculation. In addition, the authors simulate a lens structure with additional quarter wavelength matching layers (MLs) to estimate the antireflection performance.

A negative refractive index lens antenna has a high direction, a capacity to produce multiple beams and beam steering with a thin antenna size. These characteristics enable the lens antenna to be chosen as one of the effective antennas for the base station antenna in mobile communications, meeting the rapid growth in wireless connections. In this paper, the authors use a ray tracing method to calculate and determine the caustic points and their trajectories for a negative refractive index lens. These caustic points are the feed-setting positions from which the antenna can generate the beams at the desired angles. The authors also perform the simulations of negative refractive index lens antennas with feed horns set at caustics and reference feed points. The results show the accuracy and efficiency of the calculation of caustic points and the beam steering ability of the lens antennas with negative refractive indexes.