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Nowadays, emerging technologies are transforming education. Specifically, engineering education has been affected the most from this trend. In fact, the use of technology in teaching and learning influences the teaching and learning experience in our society. Therefore, this work is carried to evaluate the use of modern teaching strategies and technology tools in Jordanian engineering education. This work is to further encourage faculty in Jordanian universities to use digital technologies and adopt recent teaching strategies. This study is a questionnaire-based study that was conducted at engineering faculties in Jordanian universities. One hundred responses from engineering teaching professors were collected through google forms. The results of this pilot study clearly depict that most of the Jordanian engineering teachers are still using the traditional means for teaching engineering. Consequently, there is an essential need to build the capacity of our engineering faculties and enable them to use digital tools to enrich their teaching experience. This study provides an opportunity for policymakers in Jordan to assess the impact of emerging technologies on teaching and learning and update the regulations and policies of education accordingly.

The huge and continuous evolution in mobile communications industry increases the popularity and importance of mobile communications sector in daily life of communities. This increases the jobs in this sector since 2000 and huge numbers of university graduates’ engineers are enrolled in working inside this field. However, the absence of industry-related mobile communications course has motivated Electrical Engineering Department at Mutah University to develop a new and unique course that satisfies the industry needs and reducing the gap between mobile industry and academia. This paper shows that the bachelor degree in communication engineering is the most disseminated electrical engineering major. Accordingly, the mobile communications modules (courses) in Jordanian universities are analyzed to highlight the gap with industry needs and evolutions. To highlight the industry expectation and the required skills from newly fresh graduate communications engineer, an online form is distributed among seniors, juniors and experts’ engineers in the industry. Finally, the new course objectives, context are established at Mutah University/BSc Communications Engineering course plan. The results of the course workshops and the feedback provided by students and industry representatives indicate that the developed course and its approach have achieved the goal.

A transmitarray far-field beam scanning performance is illustrated based on the behavior of its focal region fields. It is shown that the oblique incidence of a plane wave on a transmitarray surface, forces the near-field focal point to shift mainly laterally with respect to the transmitarray surface. This behavior is shown useful in investigating a transmitarray far-field beam scanning. A beam scanning of 30 degrees is shown possible with no more than 1dBi gain loss.

A compact, low profile and multiband dual-element folded strip monopole is presented for mobile phone MIMO applications. Both the compactness and the multiband operation are achieved by loading the folded strip with a split ring resonator (SRR). The antenna elements are placed on the same mobile PCB arm in order to achieve angle diversity that enhances ports isolation, especially below 1 GHz. The proposed antenna achieves isolation of higher than 12 dB, enveloped correlation coefficients (ECC) of less than 0.1, apparent diversity gain around 10 dB and total efficiencies of greater than 60 within the frequency band of interest (GSM850, DCS1800, PCS1900, and LTE2500).

A dual-polarized rectangular slot rectenna is proposed for ambient RF energy harvesting. It is designed in a compact size of $55 \times 55 \times1.0$ mm3 and operates in a wideband operation between 1.7 to 2.7 GHz. The antenna has a two-port structure, which is fed using perpendicular CPW and microstrip line, respectively. To maintain both the adaptive impedance tuning and the adaptive power flow capability, the rectenna utilizes a novel rectifier topology in which two shunt diodes are used between the DC block capacitor and the series diode. The simulation results show that RF-DC conversion efficiency is greater 40% within the frequency band of interested at -3.0 dBm received power.

A new MIMO antenna for metal-rimmed smartphone is proposed to cover four discrete wide bands of 0.79-0.965, 1.7-2.8, 3.3- 3.9 and 4.6-6.0 GHz. The antenna utilizes both the feed line and the metal frame to achieve multi-resonant modes. The feed line is modified with small radiating parts to create resonance modes in the mid and high frequency bands. The design operates with an acceptable isolation level without any isolation circuitry. The simulated results are used to confirm the MIMO antenna performance, the results shows that the proposed design represent a promising MIMO antenna solution for current metal-rimmed smartphone 4G applications.

A compact multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna system of four-element planar inverted-L antenna (PILA). The antenna elements are installed along the corners of a PCB board. To mitigate the mutual coupling effect, compact parasitic decoupling elements are used between elements. The design covers a very wide 6dB return loss bandwidth (1700–3500 MHz) with isolation level better than 10 dB. Both simulated and measured results are obtained, and the results demonstrate that the proposed antenna is a very good candidate for mobile diversity and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) applications in recent 4G systems.

This paper presents a new two-element multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna for LTE application using an unbroken metallic rim as the primary antenna and a non- resonant capacitive coupling element (CCE) as a diversity antenna. The primary antenna covers 698–960 MHz and 1710–2690 MHz and the diversity antenna cover 1710–2690 MHz Average efficiencies above 70% and 50% have been achieved by the metallic rim antenna and non-resonant CCE respectively. A trapezoidal shaped feed is used to improve the high band performance. The unbroken metallic rim provides extra mechanical stability to mobile phones and saves the antenna space. Good isolation between the antenna elements has also been achieved. Both antennas are optimized by efficient matching circuits and conform to the requirements of ultra slim modern mobile phones.

Water antennas are a special type of liquid antennas and have attracted increasing attentions recently. In this paper, novel water antenna designs with different working mechanisms are presented. The achievable performance of water antennas designed for wide bandwidth, compactness, low profiles are illustrated. The water based antenna can be a conducting antenna, a hybrid antenna or a dielectric loaded antenna. The results demonstrate that water antennas are very promising candidates for wireless communications.

A new Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) antenna using two modified planar inverted-F antennas (PIFA) is presented in this paper. Both modified PIFA antennas are identical with each having two shorting plates instead of one shorting plate and a slot on the top radiation plate for impedance matching to increase the bandwidth of the antennas. Two slots are inserted on the ground plane to further enhance the impedance bandwidth. Isolation between the two modified PIFA antennas is achieved with the use of a strip connecting the feed plates of the two antennas. Both elements of the modified PIFA cover the frequency band from around 1800 MHz to around 2800 MHz which covers LTE/PCS (1900), UMTS/IMT (2000), LTE/AWS (2100), WiBro (2300), WLAN/Bluetooth (2450) and LTE/WiMAX (2500-2700) and can be used as a 3G and 4G antenna for MIMO and diversity applications.

A new wideband, very low profile (3 mm), PIFA antenna is proposed. It utilizes two collinear feeds, ground plane slots and modified top radiating plate to reduce the mutual coupling between the feeds and improve the impedance matching. The proposed antenna has a 10-dB impedance bandwidth from 2.25 to 3.2 GHz or a fractional bandwidth of 35 %. It covers several important wireless applications such as 2.4 GHz WLAN, bluetooth, four LTE bands (bands 7, 38, 40 and 41) and S-DMB band 2.63-2.655 GHz. Both simulated and measured results are presented to quantify and validate the antenna performance. It is demonstrated that this new antenna is an excellent candidate for mobile diversity/MIMO applications.

This paper presents a modified planar inverted-L antenna (PILA) for mobile handset applications. The proposed antenna has a low profile with a wide bandwidth. It covers most of cellular mobile system frequency bands, such as 2G systems DCS 1800 (1710-1880 MHz) and PCS 1900 (1850-1990 MHz), 3G system likes UMTS (1920-2170 MHz), it is also compatible with 4G systems (LTE and LTE-Advanced between 1700 MHz and 2700 MHz). Furthermore, WiFi (2400-2448 MHz), Bluetooth and S-DMB frequency bands are also covered by this design. This antenna comprises a small top plate which is fed by a feeding strip and a modified ground plane which plays an important role in changing the strong capacitive electric field between the top plate and the ground plane. To widen the lower frequency to 1700 MHz, the top plate is also modified, and excellent results have been obtained.

This paper presents a simple low profile modified form of PIFA with two shorting stubs. Two shorting plates and a slot on the top radiating plate are used to do impedance matching for enhancing the impedance bandwidth of the antenna. This modified planar inverted-F antenna covers the frequency band from 1650 MHz to around 2600 MHz in a single band which covers most of the frequency bands used in mobile handset applications including LTE/AWS (1700), DCS (1800), LTE (1900), PCS (1900), UMTS/IMT (2000), LTE/AWS (2100), WLAN/Bluetooth (2450) and LTE/WiMAX (2600). Simulated results are compared with measured results to validate the conclusion.

A dual-feed, water-based dielectric resonant antenna (DRA) is proposed for hand portables. It works over 2.4 to 3.34 GHz to cover 2.43 GHz WLAN, Bluetooth, three LTE bands (band 7, band 38 and band 41) and 2.63 S-DMB band. A ground defect structure is employed to provide a decoupling path between the antenna ports, and at the same time it increases the radiation efficiency of the structure because it acts as a radiator. Simulated results are presented to validate this new design which occupies a very small space.

A new single element Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) with two ports is presented in this papers. By placing the two feeding plates perpendicular to each other, polarization diversity is employed using one common radiating plate with successful provision of two isolated feeding ports. Isolation between the two ports is achieved by introducing a slot on the ground plane. This single element PIFA can act as two separate antennas and covers the frequency band from 2.35 GHz to 2.80 GHz, therefore having applications in WLAN (2.45GHz) and LTE band (2.5 GHz -2.7GHz) for diversity and MIMO applications.

In this paper, a novel U-shaped dielectric resonant antenna (DRA) with a small size but wide bandwidth is introduced. The antenna is made of a very high permittivity material (e r = 81) and has a novel shape that supports multimode. The size of the proposed antenna is smaller than other DRAs published for the frequency bands 2.4 GHz–3.0 GHz while the achieved impedance bandwidth for S11 < −10 dB is about 22%. Thus this antenna can be a good candidate for IEEE 802.11 b/g for WLAN (2.4℃2.5 GHz) and LTE (2.5℃2.7 GHz) applications, and can be modified for applications in other frequency bands.

A monopole water antenna with a relative permittivity of 81 and a variable conductivity has been studied. Three issues are addressed in the paper. Firstly, the relationship between the conductivity and antenna radiation efficiency is investigated. Secondly, a new feeding design for the water antenna is proposed and a good return loss, radiation efficiency and radiation pattern are obtained. Thirdly, experiments are conducted in anechoic and reverberation chambers to evaluate its performance. Good agreements are achieved between the simulation and measurement results. With different conductivity, the antenna may be regarded as a dielectric resonant antenna, a conducting antenna or their combination. This type of antenna can be considered as an attractive alternative to conventional antenna for various applications.