On-Glass Antenna for Connected Vehicle Communications

In this paper, an aperture coupled glass patch antenna suitable for 5 GHz WLAN/Wi-Fi, Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications is presented. The proposed antenna is embedded into a laminated vehicle window glass. The laminated vehicle window is formed of outer and inner glass plies bonded together by an interposed layer, preferably of a standard polyvinylbutyral (PVB) or similar plastic material. The patch antenna uses the inner layer glass and the PVB layer as antenna substrate. The ground plan of the patch antenna is a layer of silver screen printed onto inner surface of the inner glass. The patch antenna is fed by a coupled aperture on the ground plan; therefore, no hole is required on the glass to feed the antenna. The antenna is conformal to the glass and can be hidden under the black paint around the perimeter of the window glass. The simulated and measured results are shown for the patch antenna and the designed antenna shows good return loss from 5.1 GHz to 6.1 GHz. The antenna can be embedded into windshield, back window and side windows for a combined omnidirectional far field radiation pattern in terrestrial direction. Since the antenna is part of the window glass, no additional antenna packaging required. In addition the patch antenna can be embedded around the perimeter of window glass which offers more flexibility to package the antennas on the vehicle for reliable high speed data communication.