Supershaped dielectric resonator antenna for 5G applications

Over the past few years, the demand for large bandwidth wireless communication networks has been growing at an exponential rate. This is especially due to the increase of the connected electronic devices and to the introduction of new technologies that require high data transfer rate, e.g. video streaming and cloud computing. The establishment of the 5G wireless technology will meet these rising requirements, also through the impressive progresses in telecommunication algorithms, data processing methods and in the production of high-performance processors and antennas. It is within this background that the Dielectric Resonator Antennas (DRAs) and the supershaped DRA are becoming increasingly important for their distinctive properties. This paper presents a supershaped dielectric resonator (S-DRA) made of plastic material that can be realized by means of 3D Additive Manufacturing processes. It has been designed to operate at 3.5 GHz, as required by 5G standard, and shows at least 400 MHz of bandwidth. Comparing its performance with those of the two most conventional DRAs (cylindrical and rectangular), the numerical results assert that the S-DRA exhibits a reduced overall volume and a higher gain.