In this paper, a directional pattern-reconfigurable slot antenna at 2.4 GHz is presented. The antenna can provide three evenly-separated directional patterns and one omnidirectional pattern. The proposed solution is fully suitable for the integration in Internet of things (IoT) network base stations to increase the communication range and reduce packet collisions. The performance of the proposed antenna is numerically and experimentally assessed.

Long-Range Wide-Area Networks (LoRaWAN) allow the transmission of data via radio link from sensors, which are potentially isolated or difficult to access, to gateways and servers that are connected to cellular networks for data processing, exchange, or relay, with low transmission power. This concept employs Long-Range (LoRa) modulation and has led to the emergence of many applications for the monitoring and tracking of objects. However, due to its characteristic of a low data rate for low-power communication, the transmission of information with LoRa technology is not suitable for the fast real-time monitoring of data. Additionally, due to its narrow bandwidth, an attempt to perform localization through the LoRa modulation technique will result in very limited accuracy because of its inability to resolve multipath problems. Thus, in this paper, we propose a multi-standard Ultra-Wide Bandwidth (UWB) and LoRa end-device that is capable of measuring location with high accuracy using UWB technology and then transmitting the location information through LoRa method to gateways and the Internet of Things Network. The results of measurements in indoor and outdoor scenarios show a UWB localization accuracy that is of sub-meter level, being between 10 and 33 cm, and a UWB range of 124 m in Line-of-Sight (LOS) and 55 m in Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) applications, respectively.

Over the past few years, the Internet of Things paradigm has brought renewed significant interest to indoor positioning, tracking, and localization topics, principally since real-time locating technology allows a reference node to infer the position of tagged target nodes, creating the opportunity for millions of object-to-object awareness applications. This study first presents an overview of positioning localization techniques and discusses the use of ultra-wide bandwidth technology for complex environment monitoring, followed by consideration of the error sources that are present in line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios between a reader and a tag. A technical review of the available industrial and commercial UWB real-time locating transceivers (RTLSs) is presented, with a focus on the frontend antennas that are integrated in these systems to establish the needed wireless communication for positioning. Then, the different characteristics of these antennas are summarized and discussed, along with their impact on the localization performance in terms of the reading range, position information accuracy, object-orientation-independent localization, and multipath mitigation. Solutions are suggested to achieve antenna-based improvements to the performance of RTLSs.

This paper presents the effect of the polarization of antennas used in Ultra-Wideband systems for positioning applications. Measurements have been conducted using the DecaWave DWM1000 module and its antennas on both the transmitter (tag) and receiver (anchor) sides. The received power with the anchor-tag distance were measured with two configurations, co-polarization and cross-polarization of the two antennas. Results in real indoor scenario show that RSSI is strongly affected by the polarization sense for distance lower than 10m. For larger distance, the polarization mismatch has a negligible effect.

Wireless sensors based on passive surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology serve to accurately determine physical quantities in harsh environments. In this paper, we present a meandered planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) with a small ground plane designed to be associated with a SAW sensor to monitor the inner temperature of a car exhaust header. The SAW sensor, the design of the antenna, the association of both elements and some wireless interrogation results are presented.