Shaped-Beam Luneburg Lens Antenna With Low Beam-Crossover Loss for 6G Communication

Ensuring reliable, high-quality link coverage in 6G distributed communication systems requires favorable beam performance. This letter proposes a Luneburg-lens beam-shaping method and an antenna architecture based on pattern superposition to reduce beam-crossover loss (BCL). The architecture achieves 1.6× beamwidth broadening with overlapping dual-port excitation and a gain reduction of less than 1 dB. An 11-feed planar Luneburg lens prototype operating from 36 to 40 GHz is designed for validation, with feeds spaced at 12° intervals. Compared with conventional single-feed operation, the shaped beam's peak gain decreases by 0.9 dB, and the BCL decreases from 6.5 dB to 2.3 dB, enabling an effective ±63° 3-dB beamwidth coverage range (BCR) without increasing the number of feeds at 38 GHz. Due to its favorable beam performance, low complexity, low cost, and low power consumption, the proposed architecture is well-suited for large-scale deployment in 6G distributed communication systems.