Miniaturized and Lightweight ESPAR Antenna for WSN and IoT Applications

A new compact ESPAR antenna is investigated in this paper. The proposed antenna has 12 directional radiation patterns based on 12 passive elements and can be successfully used in Wireless Sensor Network applications. In proposed antenna design, the possibilities of 3D printing were used to implement a dielectric miniaturization overlay that allowed for reducing antenna occupied area by almost 60% and antenna profile by 27% in comparison to the standard ESPAR antenna. The total dimensions of the antenna are 98 mm in diameter and 20.25 mm in height, while the weight of the antenna is only 86 g, which makes it much more suitable for potential use in UAV-based wireless communication applications.