Beam Steering Monopole Antenna for Low Power Wireless Communication in WSN

• Published in: IOP conference series. Materials Science and Engineering 2020-02, Vol.767 (1), p.12029
• Main Authors: Mahdir, N A F, Osman, M N, Sabapathy, T, Jusoh, M, Zainudin, N A F M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Angle of reflection; Beam steering; Monopole antennas; Monopoles; Parasitic elements (antennas); PIN diodes; Switches; Wireless communications; Wireless networks; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1757-8981; 1757-899X
• DOI: 10.1088/1757-899X/767/1/012029

Antenna for wireless sensor networks (WSN) application need to satisfy a number of additional properties like antenna efficiency. Since there are many WSN nodes, the use of low cost and high efficient antenna is highly important. Therefore, in this paper, a beam steering antenna resonate at 2.4 GHz with monopole element by using parasitic array technique is proposed. The parasitic array element is introduced to achieve a better gain and acts as a reflector to steer the beam to the desired degree of angles. The structure of the proposed design consists of monopole antenna as the radiating element, and to parasitic patches with the same dimension of monopole are placed next to the radiating patch. Two switches (PIN diode) are used and embedded at the back of the structure. By activating and deactivating of the switches (ON or OFF), the parasitic is either grounded or disconnected from ground. Consequently, depending on the switches configuration, the beam pattern can be steered two direction angles which ±25° left or right. The simulated and measured results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed antenna.