A Review of Reconfigurable Leaky-Wave Antennas

Abstract

A comprehensive survey of the reconfigurable leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is made in this paper. Beam-steering and unique radiating features of LWA are highlighted particularly. Therefore, the radiation mechanism of different types of LWA, including uniform, quasi-uniform, periodic, and metamaterial LWAs are discussed in detail. The guiding structures for realizing LWAs, namely microstrip, waveguide, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW), and half-mode SIW (HMSIW) are investigated as well. Basic concepts of electronic beam-scanning LWAs are also introduced, and several state-of-the-art reconfigurable LWAs are studied thoroughly. The investigated reconfigurable LWAs are suitable for beam-scanning applications due to their compactness, ease of implementation, reasonably high gain, and relatively wide beam-scanning range, as will be demonstrated through this comprehensive review.