Launching Surface Waves with Classical Antennas

Abstract

This paper investigates the utilisation of classical antennas as surface wave (SW) launchers. SWs have potential to provide multiplicative factors of increase in the capacity over the existing multi-pair copper wires thanks to their low-loss and extended bandwidth compared to the well-known differential mode signalling, which is operating at sub-GHz frequencies. Although specially designed devices are required for high SW launching efficiencies, classical antennas can be also utilised for launching and receiving SWs by fixing a simple copper wire between antennas. In this way, transmitted power from an antenna is guided along the wire such that the received power of point-to-point wireless communication links can be substantially improved. To prove our claims, we investigate launching and receiving SWs with double-ridged horn antennas from cellular frequencies up to milli-meter wave spectrum. According to the experimental and numerical results, the proposed solution can achieve 30-50dB enhancement in the received power at short to medium communication ranges (under 150m) compared to wireless communication scenarios. Exploiting SWs in the future telecommunication networks may enable substantially improved data rates multi-Gbps links up to Tbps on the last mile without the need of replacing the copper infrastructure with fibre-optic cables. The proposed solution has the potential to provide a cost-effective alternative for enabling high data rate backhaul links required for 6G and beyond communication technologies.