A frequency selective surface (FSS) based on switchable slots in the ground plane is presented. The switching is done using an actuating MEMS bridge over the slot. The intent is to demonstrate the control of the resonance frequency of the FSS by deflecting the bridge. It is shown that by applying a voltage between the bridge and the ground plane, the bridge displaces and changes the system capacitance which in turn changes the resonance frequency. Two analyses are presented; (1) Electromechanical analysis to show how the bridge deflects by the voltage, (2) Electromagnetic analysis to show how the resonance frequency changes by the bridge deflection. The device was fabricated and tested. The measurement results are presented for two up and down positions of the MEMS bridge to verify the correctness of the theory and design.

A frequency selective surface (FSS) based on switchable slots in the ground plane is presented. The switching is done using an actuating MEMS bridge over the slot. The intent is to demonstrate the control of the resonance frequency of the FSS by deflecting the bridge. It is shown that by applying a voltage between the bridge and the ground plane, the bridge displaces and changes the system capacitance which in turn changes the resonance frequency. Two analyses are presented; (1) Electromechanical analysis to show how the bridge deflects by the voltage, (2) Electromagnetic analysis to show how the resonance frequency changes by the bridge deflection. The device was fabricated and tested. The measurement results are presented for two up and down positions of the MEMS bridge to verify the correctness of the theory and design.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) radar systems are a leading technology in autonomous vehicle object sensing. The radar’s ability to detect surrounding objects is critical to its performance. One method of increasing object detection performance is to enhance object visibility. Frequency selective reflectors can increase object visibility. This work examines the performance of a mmWave 77 GHz radar system developed by Texas Instruments in conjunction with frequency selective surfaces. Two bandpass frequency selective surfaces are designed and fabricated using a loaded cross aperture configuration to analyze their application to object detection. The chosen design frequencies are 8 GHz and 79 GHz. The frequency selective surfaces are designed and simulated in 3-D electromagnetic simulation software, High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). The frequency selective surfaces are fabricated on 127μm thick FR4 dielectric. The 8 GHz frequency selective surface demonstrates bandpass center frequency at 8.12 GHz. The 8 GHz and 79 GHz frequency selective surface reflection characteristics are compared to a copper sheets with the same physical cross section as each respective design. Although different testing methodology is used for each design, both frequency selective surfaces demonstrate bandpass characteristics at their respective design frequencies.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper describes the two main causes of fading encountered at test ranges. The first cause of fading results from nulls in the transmit antenna gain pattern. Variations in the received signal level are a result of changes in the gain pattern as the spatial relationship between transmitter and receiver change. The second cause of fading is due to multipath interference. This occurs when multiple copies of the transmitted signal with different delays arrive at the receiver and are phased relative to each other so that destructive interference occurs.

This thesis reports the methods, the deployment strategies and the resulting system performance improvement of in-building environmental modification. With the increasing use of mobile computing devices such as PDAs, laptops, and the expansion of wireless local area networks (WLANs), there is growing interest in increasing productivity and efficiency through enhancing received signal power. This thesis proposes the deployment of waveguides consisting of frequency selective surfaces (FSSs) in indoor wireless environments and investigates their effect on radio wave propagation. The received power of the obstructed (OBS) path is attenuated significantly as compared with that of the line of sight (LOS) path, thereby requiring an additional link budget margin as well as increased battery power drain. In this thesis, the use of an innovative model is also presented to selectively enhance radio propagation in indoor areas under OBS conditions by reflecting the channel radio signals into areas of interest in order to avoid significant propagation loss. An FSS is a surface which exhibits reflection and/or transmission properties as a function of frequency. An FSS with a pass band frequency response was applied to an ordinary or modified wall as a wallpaper to transform the wall into a frequency selective (FS) wall (FS-WALL) or frequency selective modified wall (FS-MWALL). Measurements have shown that the innovative model prototype can enhance 2.4GHz (IEEE 802.11b/g/n) transmissions in addition to the unmodified wall, whereas other radio services, such as cellular telephony at 1.8GHz, have other routes to penetrate or escape. The FSS performance has been examined intensely by both equivalent circuit modelling, simulation, and practical measurements. Factors that influence FSS performance such as the FSS element dimensions, element conductivities, dielectric substrates adjacent to the FSS, and signal incident angles, were investigated. By keeping the elements small and densely packed, a largely angle-insensitive FSS was developed as a promising prototype for FSS wallpaper. Accordingly, the resultant can be modelled by cascading the effects of the FSS wallpaper and the ordinary wall (FSWALL) or modified wall (FS-MWALL). Good agreement between the modelled, simulated, and the measured results was observed. Finally, a small-scale indoor environment has been constructed and measured in a half-wave chamber and free space measurements in order to practically verify this approach and through the usage of the deterministic ray tracing technique. An initial investigation showing that the use of an innovative model can increase capacity in MIMO systems. This can be explained by the presence of strong multipath components which give rise to a low correlated Rayleigh Channel. This research work has linked the fields of antenna design, communication systems, and building architecture.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / This paper will discuss the performance of pulse code modulation (PCM)/frequency modulation (FM) during frequency selective fading. Frequency selective fading occurs when the attenuation in part of the frequency band of interest is much greater than in the rest of the band of interest. The frequency selective fading model used in this paper assumes that two paths with different delays exist between the transmitter and receiver (multipath). The two-path model was simulated in the laboratory and the effects of frequency selective fading on the radio frequency (RF) spectrum and on the waveforms at the output of the FM demodulator were measured. A mathematical model was also used to predict the effects of frequency selective fading. The predicted waveshapes are compared with the laboratory data. A simple demodulator which alleviates the effects of frequency selective fading on PCM/FM at moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) will be described. This demodulator is created by detuning the telemetry receiver by a frequency equal to approximately one-half of the intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth and using the receiver’s amplitude modulation (AM) detector output rather than the FM detector output. The performance of this offset AM demodulator will be compared with the performance of an FM demodulator. Frequency selective fades measured in real-world environments will be also presented.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2006. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-256).

<p>The field of metamaterials has gained much attention within the scientific community over the past decade. With continuing advances and discoveries leading the way to practical applications, metamaterials have earned the attention of technology based corporations and defense agencies interested in their use for next generation devices. With the fundamental physics developed and well understood, current research efforts are driven by the demand for practical applications, with a famous example being the well-known microwave "invisibility cloak." Gaining exotic electromagnetic properties from their structure as opposed to their</p><p>intrinsic material composition, metamaterials can be engineered to</p><p>achieve tailored responses not available using natural materials. With typical designs incorporating resonant and dispersive elements much smaller than the operating wavelength, a homogenization scheme is possible, which leads to the meaningful interpretation of effective refractive index, and hence electric permittivity and magnetic permeability. The typical metamaterial is composed of arrays of scattering elements embedded in a host matrix. The scattering elements are typically identical, and the electromagnetic properties of the medium can be inferred from the properties of the unit cell. This convenience allows the designer to engineer the effective electromagnetic parameters of the medium by modifying the size, shape, and composition of the unit cell.</p><p>This dissertation summarizes several key projects related to my research efforts in metamaterials. The main focus of this dissertation is to develop practical approaches to frequency tunable and reconfigurable metamaterials. Chapter one serves as a background and introduction to the field of metamaterials. The purpose of chapters two, three and four is to develop different methods to realize tunable metamaterials - a broad class of controllable artificially engineered metamaterials. The second chapter develops an approach to characterizing metamaterials loaded with RF MEMS switches. The third chapter examines the effects of loading</p><p>metamaterial elements with varactor diodes and tunable ferroelectric</p><p>thin film capacitors (BST) for external tuning of the effective medium parameters, and chapter four develops a more advanced method to control the response of metamaterials using a digitally addressable control network. The content of these chapters leads up to an interesting application featured in chapter five - a reconfigurable frequency selective surface utilizing tunable and digitally addressable tunable metamaterials. The sixth and final chapter summarizes the dissertation and offers suggestions for future work in tunable and reconfigurable metamaterials. It is my hope that this dissertation will provide the foundation and motivation for new researchers in the field of metamaterials. I am confident that the reader will gain encouragement from this work with the understanding that very interesting and novel practical devices can be created using metamaterials. May this work be of aid and motivation to their research pursuits.</p> / Dissertation

In a multiuser DS-CDMA system with frequency selectivity, each user’s spreading sequence is transmitted through a different channel and the autocorrelation and the cross correlation properties of the received sequences will not be the same as that of the transmitted sequences. The best way of designing spreading sequences for frequency selective channels is to design them at the receiver exploiting the users’ channel characteristics. By doing so, we can show that the designed sequences outperform single user AWGN performance. In existing sequence design algorithms for frequency selective channels, the design is done in the time domain and the connection to frequency domain properties is not established. We approach the design of spreading sequences based on their frequency domain characteristics. Based on the frequency domain characteristics of the spreading sequences with unconstrained amplitudes and phases, we propose a reduced-rank sequence design algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, feedback bandwidth and improves the performance of some existing sequence design algorithms proposed for frequency selective channels. We propose several different approaches to design the spreading sequences with constrained amplitudes and phases for frequency selective channels. First, we use the frequency domain characteristics of the unconstrained spreading sequences to find a set of constrained amplitude sequences for a given set of channels. This is done either by carefully assigning an already existing set of sequences for a given set of users or by mapping unconstrained sequences onto a unit circle. Secondly, we use an information theoretic approach to design the spreading sequences by matching the spectrum of each user’s sequence to the water-filling spectrum of the user’s channel. Finally, the design of inner shaping codes for single-head and multi-head magnetic recoding channels is discussed. The shaping sequences are designed considering them as short spreading codes matched to the recoding channels. The outer channel code is matched to the inner shaping code using the extrinsic information transfer chart analysis. In this dissertation we introduce a new frequency domain approach to design spreading sequences for frequency selective channels. We also extend this proposed technique to design inner shaping codes for partial response channels.

Sharing communication resources in wireless communication networks, due to the ever increasing growth in the number of users and the growing demand for higher data rates, appears to be inevitable. Consequently, present wireless communication networks should provide service for a large number of users through a frequency selective and interference limited medium rather than a single band, noise limited channel. In this thesis, we study a Gaussian interference network with orthogonal frequency sub-bands with slow faded and frequency-selective channel coefficients. The network is decentralized in the sense that there is no central node to assign the frequency sub-bands to the users. Moreover, due to lack of a feedback link between the two ends of any transmitter-receiver pair, all transmitters are unaware of the channel coefficients. Since the channel is assumed to be static during the communication period of interest, the concept of outage probability is employed in order to assess the performance of the network. In a scenario where all transmitters distribute their available power uniformly across the sub-bands, we investigate the problem of how establishing a nonzero correlation ρ among the Gaussian signals transmitted by each user along different frequency sub-bands can improve the outage probability at each of the receivers. Specifically, we show in a general k-user interference channel over N orthogonal frequency sub-bands that , when receivers treat interference as noise, ρ=0 is a point of local extremum for the achievable rate at each receiver, for any realization of channel coefficients. Moreover, in the case of K=2 with arbitrary number of sub-bands, it is verified that there exists a finite level of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) such that the achievable rate has a local minimum at ρ=0, which is not necessarily the case when K>2. We then concentrate on a 2-user interference channel over 2 orthogonal frequency sub-bands and characterize the behavior of the outage probability in the high SNR regime. We consider two simple decoding strategies at the receiver. In the first scenario, receivers simply treat interference as noise. In the second scenario, the receivers have the choice either to decode the desired signal treating interference as noise or to decode interference treating the desired signal as noise before decoding the interference free signal. Indeed, in both cases, we first show that the achievable rate is an increasing function of ρ in the high SNR regime, which suggests to repeat the same signal over the sub-bands. This observation, in a sense, reflects to the behavior of the outage probability, the scaling behavior of which in the high SNR regime is characterized for the Rayleigh fading scenario.