136 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

2, 2003

Synthesis of Broad-Beam Patterns Through

Leaky-Wave Antennas With Rectilinear Geometry
Paolo Burghignoli, Member, IEEE, Fabrizio Frezza, Senior Member, IEEE, Alessandro Galli, Member, IEEE, and
Giuseppe Schettini, Member, IEEE

Abstract—In this work, the feasibility of broad-beam radiation-

pattern synthesis through leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) with recti-
linear geometry is shown for the first time. The synthesis is based
on a geometrical-optics approach and is achieved by a nonstandard
tapering of a straight LWA, which involves the variation of both
phase and leakage constants of leaky-mode propagating along the
structure. Such an approach is an alternative to that based on a
curved LWA and allows for a simpler manufacturing and a signif-
icant bulk reduction of the structure. The relevant theory is pro-
vided together with examples of broad-beam pattern synthesis.
Index Terms—Antenna synthesis, broad-beam antennas, geo-
metrical optics, leaky-wave antennas (LWAs).

I. INTRODUCTION

D IVERGING/focusing of electromagnetic waves by means

of leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) was first proposed by
Ohtera on the basis of a ray-optics model of radiation from a
structure capable of supporting a physical leaky mode [1], [2].
As explained in [2], a focused ray bundle can be achieved either
by means of a rectilinear LWA which supports a leaky mode
whose phase constant varies along the structure or by means
of an LWA physically curved to form an equi-angular spiral.
The latter configuration has been studied in [2], [3] with the
aim of obtaining an antenna with optimized radiative perfor-
mance inside a wide angular sector. This may be of particular
interest for wireless local area network (LAN) applications at
microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies.
In this letter, we study the alternative approach to broad-beam
synthesis based on a straight geometry. Its main peculiarity is
that a controlled variation of the leaky-mode phase constant Fig. 1. (a) Idealized 1-D uniform rectilinear LWA in the absence of tapering
along z . (b) Admissible regions for real and virtual foci, for a tapered antenna
along the structure is required in order to let the radiated rays radiating rays in the interval [ ;  ]. Angles  are measured with respect
be focused; this is in contrast with conventional tapering proce- to the broadside direction x.
dures for pencil beams [4], in which the phase constant does not
change. With respect to the approach in [1]–[3], the proposed formulas are derived for the variation of both phase and leakage
technique has the important advantage of avoiding a curved constants of the relevant leaky mode along the antenna length.
structure, which may be rather impractical. However, it requires In Section III, examples of pattern synthesis are reported for an-
an antenna topology that possesses enough degrees of freedom tennas with different lengths and beamwidths. Finally, in Sec-
to achieve the desired geometrical tapering [4]. tion IV, conclusions are drawn from the presented results.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the geomet-
rical-optics approach for the synthesis of rectilinear LWAs ra- II. ANALYSIS
diating in a given angular sector is presented and closed-form
The reference structure considered here is a generic one-di-
mensional (1-D) LWA of the uniform type [4]; the relevant coor-
Manuscript received March 17, 2003; revised May 27, 2003.
P. Burghignoli, F. Frezza, and A. Galli are with the Department of Electronic dinate system is shown in Fig. 1(a), where the antenna aperture
Engineering, “La Sapienza,” University of Rome, 00184 Roma, Italy (e-mail: corresponds to the interval of the axis.
galli@die.uniroma1.it). As is well known, in the high-frequency limit, the field in
G. Schettini is with the Department of Applied Electronics, “Roma Tre,” Uni-
versity of Rome, 00146 Roma, Italy (e-mail: g.schettini@uniroma3.it). can be described in terms of rays emerging from the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2003.816640 antenna aperture (plus end-point diffraction contributions due to
1536-1225/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
BURGHIGNOLI et al.: SYNTHESIS OF BROAD-BEAM PATTERNS THROUGH LWASWITH RECTILINEAR GEOMETRY 137

the finite size of the aperture) [5]. By letting the aperture field
be , where is a real phase function,
the angle formed by the ray through the aperture point at
and the broadside axis is related to the phase function by [5]

(1)

In an LWA, the aperture field is supposed to be accurately

represented by a leaky-mode propagating along the positive
direction with complex propagation constant . In a
tapered LWA, both the phase constant and the attenuation con-
stant depend on the antenna cross-section at . By assuming
a slow variation of the phase constant , the phase function
can be written as

(2)

Therefore, the angle formed by the ray emitted at and the

axis can be related to the phase constant by

(3)

where is the free-space wavenumber.

In particular, in a nontapered LWA the phase constant does not
depend on and, therefore, all the emitted rays are parallel and Fig. 2. (a) Ray congruences for a tapered LWA with (a) virtual focus
form an angle with respect to broadside [see Fig. 1(a)]. F (z ;x ) and (b) real focus F (z ; x ).

A focused system is achieved by letting all the emitted rays in-

tersect at a real or a virtual focus. If we assume that the tapering where is the distance between the
of a given antenna topology allows to obtain phase constants in virtual focus and the aperture point at . As an alternative
the range , then will be constrained by (3) to derivation of (4), we could enforce the phase condition of a
belong to a corresponding interval and, therefore, cylindrical wave ; by means of (1) and (3),
the possible locations for real and virtual foci will be as shown (4) is obtained.
in Fig. 1(b). To achieve the broadest radiated beam, the focus is The longitudinal variation of the attenuation constant is re-
to be located in the corner ( or ) of one of the two admis- lated to the squared amplitude of the field along the an-
sible regions. tenna aperture by the standard formula [4], [6]
As regards the achievable beamwidths, it should be observed
that, since the LWA is supposed to be of the uniform type, the
(5)
main beam can be located only in the forward quadrant .
However, typical useful ranges for the normalized phase con-
stant do not cover the whole interval , since a lower where is the desired antenna efficiency. The amplitude of the
limit is usually set by the increasing value of the attenuation con- aperture field is determined by the constraint of uniform radi-
stant, while an upper limit is set by the leaky mode approaching ated power in the angular range , which implies, due
its transition region to a bound-wave range [4]. As a conse- to the two-dimensional nature of the problem, that the squared
quence, the interval is a proper subset of the for- amplitude of the field at the aperture point at is inversely pro-
ward quadrant, with beamwidth typically less than 80 . On portional to the distance between this point and the focus
the other hand, if the LWA is supposed to be of the periodic
type [4], both forward and backward rays can be radiated, thus (6)
enlarging the class of achievable radiation patterns (however, a
limitation is due to the fact that periodic LWAs cannot usually
radiate in a narrow angular range around broadside). where is an arbitrary coefficient. By inserting (6) in (5), the
To illustrate the tapering procedure, let us synthesize a di- following closed-form expression is obtained for the attenuation
verging beam with virtual focus in with uniform constant as a function of :
radiated power per unit angle in the interval . By
observing Fig. 2(a), it is easy to derive by means of (3) the re-
quired longitudinal variation of the phase constant

(4) (7)
138 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 2, 2003

Fig. 3. Normalized radiation patterns in the forward quadrant of a focused Fig. 4. Same as in Fig. 3, with rays in the angular range [15 ; 75 ].
system with rays in the angular range [30 ; 60 ], for different aperture lengths:
(a) L= = 10; (b) L= = 40; and (c) L= = 70.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The alternative ray congruence with a real focus is shown in In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed LWA
Fig. 2(b), and can be obtained by a phase conjugation of the design approach, numerical simulations will be presented for
aperture field of the virtual-focus system in Fig. 2(a) (which antennas with different electrical lengths and with different an-
reverses the direction of energy propagation along each ray), gular widths of the radiated beam.
followed by a 180 rotation around the aperture center. The re- In Fig. 3, the case of an antenna designed to radiate within the
sulting formula for the normalized phase constant can simply be angular range is considered. In Fig. 3(a) the aperture
obtained by replacing in (4) with length is limited to and, therefore, the normalized
radiation pattern obtained with the ray-optics method is rather
(8) poor. By increasing the antenna length to , a sub-
stantial improvement of the radiation pattern can be obtained,
as shown in Fig. 3(b): a wide beam approximately in
while the squared amplitude of the field along the aperture is
can be observed, with internal ripple less than 3 dB. A further in-
crease of the aperture length to shows only a modest
(9) further improvement of the antenna performance, as shown in
Fig. 3(c).
and again the attenuation constant can be obtained by inserting In Fig. 4 the case is considered of an antenna designed to
(9) into (5). The result is the same as in (7), with and radiate within the wider angular range . Again, for
replaced by and , respectively. [see Fig. 4(a)] the result is not satisfactory, while for
It is to be noted that, for a given interval and nor- [in Fig. 4(b)] and [in Fig. 4(c)] a radiated
malized antenna length , the virtual-focus and real-focus beam in approximately can be observed, with 3-dB
designs give rise to the same radiation pattern in the far field, internal ripple.
although the near-field distributions along the antenna aperture The normalized phase-constant and attenuation-constant dis-
are different. Once such near field has been determined in ampli- tributions along the antenna aperture for the and
tude and phase, the far-field pattern can customarily be obtained cases are reported in Fig. 5 as a function of the nor-
via a Fourier transform. malized longitudinal abscissa for a real-focus system with
BURGHIGNOLI et al.: SYNTHESIS OF BROAD-BEAM PATTERNS THROUGH LWASWITH RECTILINEAR GEOMETRY 139

ation constants in Fig. 5(c) are rather low. Their simultaneous

variation along the aperture length can be achieved by means
of suitable antenna topologies [4]. A practical structure may
be the recently-introduced stepped rectangular-waveguide LWA
[7]. Such a structure allows us to achieve the desired values of
attenuation constant as in Fig. 5 and presents an almost inde-
pendent control of phase and leakage constants by a simple al-
teration of the geometrical parameters of the antenna cross sec-
tion, thus allowing to implement in a simple way the required
tapering procedure.

IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a nonstandard tapering procedure for uniform
LWAs has been proposed which involves a variation of both
phase and attenuation constants along the rectilinear aperture.
This approach allows us to obtain in a simple way broad-beam
radiation patterns, useful, e.g., for wireless LAN applications,
avoiding curved structures. Original closed-form expressions
have been reported for the required variations of phase and at-
tenuation constants and examples of radiation-pattern synthesis
are reported to demonstrate the validity of the proposed ap-
proach.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank M. Martellucci for her help
in the numerical simulations.

Fig. 5. (a) Normalized phase constant =k ; (b) normalized attenuation
constant =k for L = 10 ; and (c) normalized attenuation constant =k
for L = 40 , as a function of the normalized abscissa z=L for the synthesis
of wide-beam antennas with a real focus and uniform radiated power in the
angular ranges [15 ; 75 ] (solid line) and [30 ; 60 ] (dashed line); antenna
efficiency  = 0:9.
antenna efficiency . As expected, the phase constant is
a decreasing function of , and the range of values neces-
sary for the synthesis is larger for broader radiated beams. The
attenuation constant presents in all cases a rapidly increasing
behavior near the end of the aperture at , with a modest
dependence on antenna beamwidth.
It can be observed that the values of normalized phase and at-
tenuation constants in Fig. 5(a) and (b) are within ranges easily
obtainable with practical LWAs, while the normalized attenu-
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