Communication System Comparison of IoT Applications Using Custom-Designed Antennas: A Basic Experimental Study

A comparative study of the performance of a communication system for IoT applications is presented. The experiment is based on the bit error rate, which is obtained by varying the distance between two transceiver modules, each attached to a microcontroller Arduino Uno. Four scenarios are considered for our experimentation. Each scenario is mainly characterized by interchanging radiator elements which are attached to the transceiver modules. For this, two antennas are designed and implemented: a modified shape-optimized Landstorfer Yagi-Uda antenna and a printed turnstile antenna. The measurements show good agreement, with simulations having gain values of about 9 dBi and 3 dBi for the quasi Yagi-Uda structure and the turnstile antenna, respectively. System performance tests are conducted to compare the performance of the commercial solution at various distances to custom-designed antennas. These tests aim to evaluate the improvement achieved using a new set of antennas. The key to this solution is the use of a high-directivity antenna for data transmission and a circular polarized omnidirectional antenna for reception, which shows an improvement of around 60% in terms of the bit error rate during data transmission compared to the pair of commercial antennas included in the RF module.