New Compact Antenna Array for MIMO Internet of Things Applications

A communication system is proposed for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in desert areas with extended coverage of regional area network requirements. The system implements a developed six-element array that operates at a 2.45 GHz frequency band and is optimized to reduce the size and limit element coupling to less than -20 dB. Analysis of the proposed system involves a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operation to obtain the diversity gain and spectral efficiency. In addition, the radiation efficiency of the proposed antenna is greater than 65% in the operation bandwidth (more than 30 MHz) with a peak of 73% at 2.45 GHz. Moreover, an adaptive beamforming system is presented based on monitoring the direction of arrival (DOA) of various signals using the root MUSIC algorithm and utilizing the DOA data in a minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) technique beamformer. The developed array is found to have an envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) value of less than 0.013, mean effective gain (MEG) of more than 1 dB, diversity gain of more than 9.9 dB, and channel capacity loss (CCL) of less than 0.4 bits/s/Hz over the operation bandwidth. Adaptive beamforming is used to suppress interference and enhance the signal-to-interference noise ratio (SINR) and is found to achieve a data rate of more than 50 kbps for a coverage distance of up to 100 km with limited power signals.