The design of a reconfigurable antenna for Cognitive Radio applications has been

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C ONCLUSIONS

The design of a reconfigurable antenna for Cognitive Radio applications has been

described. In particular, the device is suitable to be employed for the communication

function in a Cognitive Radio network where the sensing spectrum function is executed by

another antenna or by a base station. The patch antenna comprises two parasitic elements

connected by using PIN diodes as RF switches. This configuration allows to change the

structure of antenna and thus its working frequencies. A parametric study has been

performed to modify the starting structure so to avoid the use of impedance matching

network. The proposed antenna accomplishes the imposed tasks since it provides a simple

and low profile device with a good degree of reconfigurability. Future work development

involves the employment of different RF switches (varactor, MEMS) and further

improvements to the antenna geometry in order to obtain a higher level of reconfigurability

and better performance in terms of bandwidth.