Active Antenna Hub: A Multiport Shared-Antenna Architecture for Scalable Internet of Things Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) engineering demands compact, scalable, and multifunctional wireless systems and devices. Conventional wireless architectures rely on multiple and ever-increasing antennas to support new services, leading to increased size, design complexity, and mutual coupling, especially problematic in volume limited terminals. This article presents the “Active Antenna Hub,” a novel shared-antenna architecture that enables multiple systems to operate simultaneously using a single electrically small antenna. The proposed architecture integrates a passive antenna, an active matching network based on an ohmic-biased transistor, and Chebyshev bandpass filters for multiband, multiport functionality, supporting wireless system scalability without changes to antennas. To validate, an antenna prototype supporting frequency modulation (FM) and digital television (DTV) services is developed with the system-level experiments, demonstrating the high system scalability and reduced mutual coupling without compromising performance. The proposed Active Antenna Hub architecture offers a compact, scalable, and efficient solution of antennas for next-generation IoT devices.