• Cognitive Radio
• Microstrip Antennas
• Patch Antennas
• Reconfigurable Antennas
• SDR

The aim of this thesis is the design of a novel reconfigurable microstrip antenna for Cognitive Radio. In these applications the radio is aware of all available resources for the communication. The antenna employed in a Cognitive Radio receiver should be: reconfigurable, low profile, light and with a low power consumption. The proposed antenna is able to change istantaneously its working frequency as soon as a region of spectrum becomes avaible. The structure is composed by a central fed patch and two parassitic elements connected by using PIN diodes as RF switches. This configuration allows to change the structure of antenna and thus its working frequencies. It can be implemented to execute the communication function in a Cognitive Radio architecture where the sensing spectrum is carried out by another antenna or by a base station. Moreover a trade off between low complexity and a good degree of reconfigurability is obtained. In this thesis the simulations results about this antenna are presented.