Design of an IoT Mimetic Antenna for Direction Finding

This paper presents a method to design and optimize a mimetic, multi-band antenna for direction-finding applications based on multiple IoT mobile nodes for protecting sensitive areas. A set of 84 antenna configurations were selected based on possible resonant paths and simulated using a Method of Moments (MoM)-based tool to compute resonant frequencies, VSWR, and gain across three frequency bands centered on 433 MHz, 877.5 MHz, and 2.4 GHz. Compared to a brute-force approach requiring 814 full-wave simulations, our technique dramatically reduces computing time by performing only 84 simulations, followed by a fine-tuning procedure targeting the antenna segments with the highest contribution to the error figure. The final design provides good gain and VSWR figures over almost all the frequency ranges of interest.