Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation, 2013, 1, 1-3
http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojapr.2013.11001 Published Online June 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojapr) 1
OJAPr Editorial
Miroslav Joler
Faculty of Engineering, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia.
Received May 20th, 2013; Revised June 21st, 2013; Accepted June 27th, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Miroslav Joler. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
On behalf of Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP)
Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation (OJAPr) edi-
torial board and staff, it is my honor to write this editorial
in the wake of the first issue of the OJAPr. The OJAPr is
a new journal in SCIRP’s publishing portfolio, and
comes as a natural addition to already present journals
pertinent to communications and computer sciences, such
as the Int’l Journal of Communications, Network and
System Sciences (IJCNS), the E-Health Telecommunica-
tion Systems and Networks (ETSN), or the Wireless En-
gineerin g a nd T ech nology (WET) journal .
Joining the growing trend of open-access journals, that
has gained popularity in recent years, the OJAPr has also
adopted the policy of open-access publishing, enabling
the contributing authors to disseminate their works to a
substantially larger public in comparison to member-
ship-based journals and at the same time retain the cop y-
right on their manuscript, while interested readers have a
free access to published papers.
In today’s world of fast-paced technological advances
in wireless communication devices and services, one
component, amongst many other important components,
makes it an inevitable part—an antenna. All who know
anything about antennas are familiar with their subtle
nature: on one hand, a randomly sized and shaped piece
of a conducting wire can eventually act as an antenna
working at some frequency band and receive or transmit
radio waves successfully enough, while, on the other
hand, an exact and thorough understanding of antenna
parameters and behavior quickly gets complicated and
challenging when trying to mathematically describe its
characteristics and successfully design it for a specific
goal, or computationally analyze it, manufacture it and
assemble precisely and finally verify its desired charac-
teristics by adequate measurements.
Nowadays, we enjoy the commodity of powerful per-
sonal computers and advanced computer aided engineer-
ing (CAE) software tools to model and predict antenna
characteristics by making use of full-wave solvers that
are based on some of proven numerical methods, such as
the finite-difference time-domain method or the finite
element method, and often being empowered by some of
popular optimization algorithms, such as the genetic al-
gorithm or the particle swarm optimization algorithm, to
enable fine tuning of an antenna design in order to meet
specific goals, yet in spite of that, it is still not an easy
task to design an antenna that will meet specifications of
modern communication devices and services, due to an
increased number of goals that are to be met. To be able
to transfer data using various wireless technologies, for
example GSM, WCDMA, UMTS, WLAN, Bluetooth,
NFC, WiMAX, or LTE, modern wireless devices (e.g.
smartphones, tablets, or laptops) must be equipped with
antennas that can efficiently operate at multiple fre-
quency bands and that goal requires innovative antenna
designs that have not been part of classical antenna text-
books and practice. Thus, to meet the required frequency
ranges and also fit an antenna into a fairly small space
that is left for it in today’s feature-packed devices, pre-
sent-day antennas are often designed using some combi-
nation slots or slits, electronic switches such as PIN di-
odes or MEMS (microelectromechanical switches), vias,
and meandering microstrip lines lying on top of the sub-
strate, thus producing the so-called frequency-, polariza-
tion-, or radiation pattern-agile antennas, which can
only be accomplished by an extensive use of CAE tools
in order to predict their performance in a sufficiently
accurate and time-efficient fashion.
On the base station side of an RF link, present chal-
lenges are related to implementing techniques for more
efficient usage of the available spectrum and a need for
an increased channel capacity. As the number of wire-
lessly connected gadgets undergoes a strong growth
every year, there is a clear need to secure more band-
width to accommodate for the growing data amounts.
Very soon in the future will the wireless networks have
to pass the data amounts that are manifold larger from
what we transfer today. Wireless providers are in need
for more bandwidth and that will call for a new shift to-
wards higher carrier frequencies. There are multiple as-

OJAPr Editorial
2
pects involved in research and development (R&D) ef-
forts tackling those issues and the ultimate success is
anticipated to be accomplished by no single means, but
rather by judiciously combining multiple techniques as
discussed next.
One aspect of improving the quality of service and in-
creasing the capacity lies in implementation of smart(er)
antenna arrays on the base station towers. Although the
principle of electronic beam scanning has been known
for years in radar systems and there has been a good deal
of research tackling some sort of smart antennas, it
seems that they still have not been adopted in base sta-
tions towers to a proportional degree and one reason for
that certainly lies in an increased cost that wireless pro-
viders would have faced to implement them in their tow-
ers due to an increased complexity of such solutions.
Smart antennas has been a term denoting antenna arrays
that can electronically adjust their radiation pattern to
follow select mobile station(s) or/and reduce the level of
interference from undesired sources. Depending on the
specific goals that were set in the pertinent works, there
is a variety of alternativ e terms that are close to the term
“smart antennas”. Most commonly they are referred to as
the beam-forming arrays, adaptive antennas (or adaptive
arrays), up to a more recent terms of self-adaptive arrays
and self-recoverable antennas.
Additionally, channel capacity can be increased by
making use of polarization agility or diversity by having
a set of orthogonally polarized antennas, or using elec-
tronic switches to switch between the orthogonal polari-
zations. While increasing the channel capacity has so far
been addressed to the base station side, it can be expected
in the future that part of that process will be assigned to
mobile handset antennas as well by making them smarter
and reconfigurable and that R&D has been underway for
some time now, too.
Yet another known way to increase the network capac-
ity was to reduce the cell size of a wireless network,
while at the same time helping mobile handsets work
with a lower output power, thus reducing the specific
absorption ratio (SAR) that a broad public is getting
more sensitive to in the context of possible health effects
of radio waves.
Since the quantity of data being transferred over wire-
less networks is growing fast every year, due to a fast-
growing number of wireless devices and users requesting
always-on connection to their emails, websites, social
networks, for playing or sharing videos on-the-go, cur-
rent 4G networks are, or will soon be, about their maxi-
mum capacity and will have to be replaced with faster
networks containing more bandwidth. Due to that, it is
expected that 5G networks will have to be defined and
implemented by about 2020. Research efforts in that
sense are already underway (see, e.g., Samsung R&D,
the METIS project in Europe, or the WiGig alliance).
The major directions of that R&D will likely include a
further reduction of the cell size, thereby forming the
so-called pico cells or femtocells and by moving the car-
rier frequency to a millimeter-wave range, yet simulta-
neosly retaining the request for having multi-band an-
tennas that will have to cover more than eight frequency
bands in order to support all wireless standards. It is pos-
sible than novel modulation schemes will also be inves-
tigated in order to support the ov erall change towards 5G
standards. As devices working in the millimeter-wave
range will exhibit a shorter rang e to the base station than
current mobile handsets, as higher frequencies are prone
to higher attenuation, additional base stations will have to
be “inserted” into the existing 4G networks. Because of
that, it can be expected that additional research will take
place searching for more accurate models in describing a
communication ch annel under such cond ition, where one
small niche of th at will be abou t the wireless netwo rks of
future airplanes, that are anticipated to replace a sizeable
portion of current wiring with wireless networks, to make
the airplanes lighter and offer personal communications
and entertainment services available to all passengers wi-
thout compromising safety of plane navigation.
Another important area of R&D nowadays includes
terahertz frequencies. Applications related to them typi-
cally involve various noninvasive safety systems like
those for airport passenger screening, or detection of ex-
plosives, early detection of cracks in the solid materials
etc. Terahertz frequencies and applications have gained
interest in recent years for their ability to penetrate into
materials and trigger their distinct spectral signature that
can be used to detect certain substances or warn on pos-
sible cracks in the material and more R&D can be an-
ticipated in that d irection to take a full advantag e of their
promising traits.
Taking into account the whole package of having to
achieve a further progress in reconfigurable multi-band
antennas that will be even smaller than the present-day
antennas, due to a shift in operating frequencies towards
60 GHz and higher, along with the anticipated changes in
the network infrastructure, and new conditions in the
future communication channels, the upcoming years
aiming for 2020 (or as close to it as possible) offer plenty
of R&D excitement in the wireless technolog y arena and
the goal to attain wireless data rates in the order of giga
bits per second, which will be 10 to 100 times more than
we can afford today.
Having all the aforementioned in mind, establishing a
journal specializing in antennas and propagation was a
logical next step for SCIRP. The OJAPr invites research-
ers to submit their original research work for possible
publication, whose focus matches the general aims of the
journal—discussing ideas and research results pertinent

OJAPr Editorial
3
to analysis, design, development, optimization, meas-
urement techniques, and applications of antennas and
propagations models. The scope of the journal falls
within a wide range of categories including, but not lim-
ited to, Active and Adaptive Antennas, Antennas Analy-
sis and Design, Beam Control and Steering, Channel
Modeling, Intelligent Antennas, Millimeter-Wave Tech-
niques, or Radio Wave Propagation. For a more detailed
list of topics please visit the OJAPr website. All submit-
ted manuscripts will undergo a rigorous peer-review
process being conducted by the OJAPr Editorial Board,
which is staffed by experienced international researchers.
The OJAPr office is thankful to its first Editorial Board
members who readily offered their service to the journal
and will be helping the manuscript submission and re-
view process, namely: Prof. Ahmed M. Attiya as Edi-
tor-in-Chief, and Prof. Federico Alimenti, Dr. Haroldo T.
Hattori, Prof. M. Ali Hooshyar, Dr. Miroslav Joler, Dr.
Chi-Wah Kok, Prof. Igor V. Minin, Dr. Vaclav Papez, Dr.
Càndid Reig, Dr. Zaharias D. Zaharis, and Dr. Domenico
Zito, as Editorial Board members, listed in an alphabeti-
cal order.
Again, on behalf of the Editorial Board members, my-
self, and all of the OJAPr staff members who will be
serving the publication process, it is my pleasur e to inv ite
researchers to prepare and submit to SCIRP’s OJAPr
manuscripts describing their original research results for
possible publication. Short reports and book reviews are
also welcome, subject to OJAPr aims, scope, particular
topics, and manu script preparation gu idelines th at will be
maintained on the OJAPr web website.
Sincerely,
Miroslav Joler, Ph.D.
OJAPr Editorial Board Member