Improved design of a CRLH leaky-wave antenna and its application for DoA estimation

In this paper, we propose a composite right/left handed two port leaky-wave antenna (CRLH-LWA) having reduced size and enhanced beam steering capabilities. The antenna is made of a cascade of metamaterial CRLH unit cells, populated with varactor diodes. By properly designing the CRLH unit cell, the propagation constant has been optimized within the radiated zone achieving maximum beam steering and keeping a nearly constant gain for all of the beam configurations. Through a modified multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, we employed the antenna for direction of arrival (DoA) estimation. Validation of the algorithm along with the proposed CRLH-LWA has been conducted in an anechoic chamber and the estimated DoA results are in good agreement with the predicted angles.