A practical miniature antenna design for future internet of things enabled smart devices

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) will play an important role in the contemporary communication networks. In this modern and future communication paradigm hundreds of different smart Internet enabled devices will communicate with each other continuously. For such communication networks and smart devices, apart from the sophisticated communication protocols, efficient hardware will also play a very crucial role. Antennas being at the front end of communication, are one of the important components of such a hardware. The antennas for IoT applications are required to exhibit three important characteristics, namely; (i) small size, (ii) energy efficiency and (iii) ability to operate in multi antenna environment. In this paper, we propose an antenna design that fulfils these important requirements. We propose an ultra-wideband antenna that is small in size compared to other existing designs, with dimensions 24 × 28 mm2, that can easily fit in hand-held mobile devices. Measured results indicate that the antenna not only has a very small power return loss but also exhibits a low mutual coupling that highlights that the proposed design is capable to operate in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configurations.