UC San Diego

Large antenna arrays have become foundational to modern wireless communication systems, providing the array gain and spectral efficiency needed to meet growing user demand across new frequency bands. Increasing the number of antennas, however, also raises the power consumption, cost, and physical footprint of the hardware. Reconfigurable antennas have emerged as a way to add flexibility to the array while keeping power and cost low, enabling more energy-efficient systems. Among these, the dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) is a particularly promising candidate, achieving low-power, reconfigurable beamforming through an array of tunable radiating elements. The DMA, however, is subject to physical constraints not present in conventional phased arrays, such as a restricted set of achievable beamforming weights. These constraints can degrade the performance and are not yet fully understood in the current literature.In this dissertation, we develop new models, beamforming algorithms, and an improved element design that address these limitations and make the DMA a feasible option for modern wireless communication systems. First, we design a hierarchical codebook that exploits the unique weight properties of the DMA to enable energy-efficient, limited-feedback beamforming. Next, we extend our analysis to the wideband regime, deriving a closed-form approximation of the DMA beamforming gain over large bandwidths and proposing a successive beamforming algorithm that improves wideband performance. We then move beyond single-beam beamforming to address interference mitigation and source localization. We develop a more accurate DMA element model that accounts for the scattering within the waveguide and train a machine learning model to capture the mutual coupling between elements, achieving accurate and consistent null steering in electromagnetic simulations. Finally, we improve the DMA element itself, proposing a rotated elliptical meta-atom that achieves higher gain, radiation efficiency, and cross-polarization isolation than conventional square elements, and we fabricate the element and an array prototype to demonstrate its beamforming capabilities through measurements.