Overview Of Antennas And Wireless Technologies

Yagi Antenna

1. An antenna is a device or a transducer that is mainly used for converting the radio frequency field into alternating current. It can be described as a metallic structure that is capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves (Costantine et al., 2015). Antennas can be of different shapes and sizes and is mainly used for transmission of electromagnetic waves. The following sections give an overview of Yagi, Horn and cellular antennas.

It is a directional antenna that consists of a number of parallel elements mounted across an insulating support that is used for transmission of the electromagnetic signals. Yagi antennas are mainly used for communicating over a medium range. The picture below represents the structure of a Yagi Antenna-

                                                          

                                                               (Source: Tang, Shi & Ziolkowski, 2015)

The yagi antenna had gain popularity and was widely used for television reception. It is used for both domestic and commercial application where there is a need for RF antenna (Liu & Xue, 2013). The Yagi antenna is widely used in a number of applications such as television signal reception that need the use of RF antenna along with directivity. The strength and weaknesses of Yagi antenna are discussed below.

The significant strengths and the advantages of Yagi antenna are as follows-

1. The high gain output of yagi antenna provides a good range and has the most gain for the physical size in comparison to the antennas associated with log periodic.
2. Yagi antenna is capable of filtering the disturbances observed from a different direction, specifically from the opposite direction that makes it a good option for the telecommunication applications.

The disadvantages of Yagi are discussed nelow (Liu & Xue, 2013)-

1. It is sensitive to frequency and does not offer a large gain. Yagi offers a moderate gain of about 7 dB.
2. The design is significantly obstructive in nature.

Horn is mainly used for receiving and the transmission of the microwave as well as the RF signals and is shaped like a horn. Horn is a type of antenna that consists of a flared waveguide in shape of a horn (Cai et al., 2015). The picture below represents the structure of a horn antenna.

                                                               

                                                           (Source: Bayat-Makou, Sorkherizi & Kishk, 2017)

The various types of the horn antenna are pyramid horn antenna, conical horn antenna, exponential horn antenna, sectoral horn antenna and corrugated horn antenna. The strength and weakness of this type of antenna are as follows (Bayat-Makou, Sorkherizi & Kishk, 2017)-

The strength and weaknesses of making use of horn antenna are as follows (Pan et al., 2013)-

1. Horn antenna is simple in construction and is capable of delivering adequate directivity.
2. Horn antenna offers bandwidth of about 10%.
3. Horn antenna along with parabolic reflector is capable of delivering high gain.

The weaknesses of horn antenna are as follows-

1. Horn antenna is not capable of providing a directive beam
2. The usual gain of horn antenna is generally limited to 20dB.

Cellular antenna is a key technology behind the operation of cellular phone system and it converts a guided radio wave energy to energy that is radiated in free space (Becker et al., 2013). Cellular antenna is a key element of the communication network. The strength and weakness of cellular network is discussed below.

1. Cellular antennas provide greater security (Malicki & Johnson, 2017).
2. Cellular antenna can provide coverage across the glove

1.  It is complex and is difficult to maintain
2. It is considerably more expensive than the other antennas.

On analyzing the three types of antennas it can be commented that cellular antennas will be dominant player in future, considering its capabilities to establish long distance wireless links.

2. Wireless technology mainly makes use of radio waves in transmission of information without the need of cables or wiring. There are a number of advantages of making use of wireless technology and wireless network, which includes increasing mobility and the cost of operations. Wireless technology is used computer, wireless card, software and other digital devices (Caro, 2014).  However, it is necessary to research into different wireless networking protocols to understand which one will be a dominant player in future (Geraci et al., 2014). The recent wireless technologies that will be discussed in this section are WiGig, RFID and ZigBee. The three wireless technologies are discussed in the following section.

Horn Antenna

The radio frequency identification of RFID is a technology where information can be transferred by encoding the digital data in RFID tags (Li et al., 2017). This technology is quite similar to bar-coding but has a number of advantages over the bar code system. One of the significant advantages of RFID is that it can also be read outside the line of sight. The strengths, weaknesses and the security challenges are discussed below.

The strength or advantages of RFID are as follows (Lu et al., 2015)-

1.  RFID tags can be easily used for different applications such as luggage tracking, monitoring the health information and so on
2. This wireless technology is versatile in nature and helps in providing accurate location of any equipment to the reader.

1. Initial investment cost in implementation of RFID is quite high.
2. The external electromagnetic interference associated with RFID can limit remote reading.

1. Tracking of people gives rise to privacy issue
2. There are certain security challenges associated with the use of RFID technology.

ZigBee is a network that is used to address the low cost wireless links to IoT networks. The ZigBee standard mainly works in IEEE 802.15.4 physical radio specification. It is built to control the sensor network on IEEE 802.15.4 standard used for networks in wireless personal area (Kim et al., 2014). The strength, weakness and the security issues associated with ZigBee are as follws.

The strengths of ZigBee technology are as follows-

1. Setting up of a ZigBee network is quite easy.
2. ZigBee network is easy to monitor and is easily scalable.

The weaknesses of ZigBee technology are as follows-

1. ZigBee is less secure than WIFI network.
2. There is certain security issues associated with ZigBee as it is prone to attack from the unauthorized people.

The security challenges associated with ZigBee are as follows (Rangan, Rappaport & Erkip, 2014)-

1. It is prone to attack from unauthorized users or hackers.
2. The ZigBee network is less secure than Wifi and is therefore prone to cyber attacks.

It is a high speed and short range technology of local networking that enables the data rates up to 7 GBPS and is teen times faster than the WIFI network. This new WIFI network will eventually lead to significantly faster wireless connection. The strength, weakness and the security challenges associated with WIGig are as follows.

The strengths of WiGig are as follows-

1. Makes use of Advanced security mechanism and support a high performance wireless implementation.
2. It has a bit rate of 7Gbps in 60GHz ISM band.

The weaknesses of WiGig are as follows-

1.  It works only for a short range
2. It has certain compatibility issues as well

One of the significant security challenge associated with WiGig is that it is prone to cyber attacks. However, on analysis of the three wireless technologies it can be said that WiGig has a capability of becoming dominant in future mainly due to its speed. However, certain amendments in the technology are required as well.

3. Software defined wireless networking plays a huge role in revolutionizing the telecommunication sector. Software defined networking is mainly featured by the separation of data planes and is therefore considered as a paradigm associated with wired networking technology (Bernardos et al., 2014). SDN supports virtualization that helps the mobile network operators in deploying the new services quite faster. Software defined networking enables the network administrators to control the traffic and the network in a centralized manner. The use of Software defined networking is required in the telecommunications as the users’ demands have been considerably increasing over the years and for this reason virtualization is required. Apart from that, the necessity of deploying a software defined network is to standardize the interface and enable control on the different mobile devices. Thus, the telecommunication sector is now experiencing a major revolution with the help of SDN, which will help in shaping the way the network and services are designed. SDN coupled with virtualization provides the network operators with the tools of deploying the new services much faster in comparison to the monolithic and tightly integrated dedicated machinery (Bernardos et al., 2014). There are numerous potential of deploying Software defined networking paradigm to the mobile wireless networks that has been highlighted in the research paper. Since a very high level of integration is required in SDN paradigm, there has a huge potential of applying SDN in mobile networks. The current efforts that are made in the field of software defined networking follows a member driven standards in the organization that aims in promoting and adopting software defined networking (Bernardos et al., 2014). Therefore it can be said that the major revolution that the telecommunication sector is experiencing can be controlled by software defined networking.

Cellular Antenna

The need of software defined network is considerably increasing as the wireless networks are facing a number of challenges mainly because of their inflexible and expensive network infrastructure (Rangisetti &Tamma, 2017). The use of software defined networking plays a significant role for network virtualization. In wired network, the control plane and the data plane are integrated together tightly. However, the network devices are needed to run complex and distributed network for traffic routing.  There is a striking difference between the wired and the wireless networks mainly because the switches and the routers are tightly integrated in the wired networking devices. The software defined networking encourages the real time experiments that make our life more manageable and flexible (Rangisetti &Tamma, 2017). There is generally a demand for higher rates in mobile networks thus increasing the need of software defined networking in wireless networks. With the revolutionary progress in the field of computer networking in the recent years, the software defined networking is currently considered to be one of the best alternative solutions to the highly specialized hardware executing standard protocols. The article “An Architecture for Software Defined Wireless Networking” focuses on the potential of using software defined networking in mobile wireless network.

References 

Bayat-Makou, N., Sorkherizi, M. S., & Kishk, A. A. (2017). Substrate integrated horn antenna loaded with open parallel transitions. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 16, 349-351.

Becker, R., Cáceres, R., Hanson, K., Isaacman, S., Loh, J. M., Martonosi, M., … & Volinsky, C. (2013). Human mobility characterization from cellular network data. Communications of the ACM, 56(1), 74-82.

Bernardos, C. J., Oliva, A. d. l., Serrano, P., Banchs, A., Contreras, L. M., Jin, H., & Zuniga, J. C. (2014). An architecture for software defined wireless networking. IEEE Wireless Communications, 21(3), 52-61. doi: 10.1109/MWC.2014.6845049

Cai, Y., Qian, Z. P., Cao, W., Zhang, Y., Jin, J., Yang, L., & Jing, N. (2015). Compact wideband SIW horn antenna fed by elevated-CPW structure. IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag, 63(10), 4551-4557.

Caro, D. (2014). Wireless networks for industrial automation. ISA.

Costantine, J., Tawk, Y., Barbin, S. E., & Christodoulou, C. G. (2015). Reconfigurable antennas: Design and applications. Proceedings of the IEEE, 103(3), 424-437.

Geraci, G., Dhillon, H. S., Andrews, J. G., Yuan, J., & Collings, I. B. (2014). Physical layer security in downlink multi-antenna cellular networks. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 62(6), 2006-2021.

Kim, T., Kim, S. H., Yang, J., Yoo, S. E., & Kim, D. (2014). Neighbor table based shortcut tree routing in ZigBee wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 25(3), 706-716.

Li, X., Li, D., Wan, J., Vasilakos, A. V., Lai, C. F., & Wang, S. (2017). A review of industrial wireless networks in the context of industry 4.0. Wireless networks, 23(1), 23-41.

Liu, J., & Xue, Q. (2013). Microstrip magnetic dipole Yagi array antenna with endfire radiation and vertical polarization. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 61(3), 1140-1147.

Lu, X., Wang, P., Niyato, D., Kim, D. I., & Han, Z. (2015). Wireless networks with RF energy harvesting: A contemporary survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 17(2), 757-789.

Malicki, J. J., & Johnson, C. A. (2017). The cilium: cellular antenna and central processing unit. Trends in cell biology, 27(2), 126-140.

Pan, W., Huang, C., Chen, P., Pu, M., Ma, X., & Luo, X. (2013). A beam steering horn antenna using active frequency selective surface. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 61(12), 6218-6223.

Rangan, S., Rappaport, T. S., & Erkip, E. (2014). Millimeter-wave cellular wireless networks: Potentials and challenges. Proceedings of the IEEE, 102(3), 366-385.

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Tang, M. C., Shi, T., & Ziolkowski, R. W. (2015). Flexible efficient quasi-Yagi printed uniplanar antenna. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 63(12), 5343-5350.