Empirical Evaluation of a 28 GHz Antenna Array on a 5G Mobile Phone Using a Body Phantom

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive method for evaluating 28 GHz antenna arrays on 5G mobile phones using both numerical and physical human body phantoms, demonstrating realistic and repeatable testing conditions for antenna performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining numerical and simplified physical phantoms for accurate, repeatable antenna evaluation at millimeter-wave frequencies on mobile devices.

Findings

Experimental gains match numerical simulations across all angles.

The physical phantom provides a repeatable testing environment.

The antenna array achieves high spherical coverage at 28 GHz.

Abstract

Implementation of an antenna array on a 5G mobile phone chassis is crucial in ensuring the radio link quality especially at millimeter-waves. However, we generally lack the ability to design antennas under practical operational conditions involving body effects of a mobile user in a repeatable manner. We developed numerical and physical phantoms of a human body for evaluation of mobile handset antennas at 28 GHz. While the numerical phantom retains a realistic and accurate body shape, our physical phantom has much simpler hexagonal cross-section to represent a body. Gains of the phased antenna array configuration on a mobile phone chassis, called co-located array is numerically and experimentally evaluated. The array is formed by placing two sets of 4-element dual-polarized patch antenna arrays, called two modules, at two locations of a mobile phone chassis. Modules are intended to collect the maximum amount of energy to the single transceiver chain. Spherical coverage of the realized gain by the array shows that the experimental statistics of the realized gains across entire solid angles agree with numerical simulations. We thereby demonstrate that our antenna evaluation method reproduces the reality and our phantom serves repeatable tests of antenna array prototypes at 28 GHz.