On the Potential of Annular Sectors for Beamsteering in Miniaturized Platforms

Beamsteering on highly miniaturized platforms is often limited by aperture size, mutual coupling, and the lack of reconfiguration degrees of freedom. This work highlights the advantages of annular-sector antennas for compact beamsteering platforms. The paper proposes a novel sector patch antenna in which each annular sector is driven through an independent port, enabling reconfiguration through amplitude/phase weighting. Using full-wave electromagnetic simulations, we demonstrate multiple beamsteering modalities from the same physical aperture: (i) elevation-plane scanning via progressive phase control, (ii) bidirectional patterns through symmetric excitations, and (iii) multi-band beam states enabled by frequency-dependent excitation and modal behavior. The annular-sector geometry provides good isolation between ports and supports beam states covering both elevation and azimuth planes. The presented concept offers a compact, low-profile approach to beamsteering suitable for highly size-constrained platforms.