SMILE antenna arrays for wireless communication

The paper discusses the recently proposed smart antenna architecture based on the spatial multiplexing of local elements (SMILE) technique. A new method of reducing mutual coupling in the SMILE type smart antenna receiver is proposed. The new method utilizes the dynamic switching nature of the SMILE array feed network to reduce mutual coupling. It is shown that proper placement of the switching device in the feed network reduces the magnitude of the surface current on the patch elements not activated by the SMILE system. Through simulations, this reduction in current is shown to improve the active element pattern to nearly the ideal single element pattern. Furthermore, it is shown that the radiation patterns formed by the SMILE smart antenna array using this technique match extremely closely with ideal patterns predicted by theory.