High-performance low-power smart antenna for smart world applications

This paper overviews a low-power beam-switched smart antenna. The antenna operates at 2.4 GHz frequency band, has low power consumption (1.5 mW), and is intended for smart world applications in communications and metering. The antenna has demonstrated 4× improvement in throughput and 2× reduction in latency, as compared to an equivalent gain omnidirectional antenna. The tests were done in a mesh network environment. In addition, the modifications made to the wireless driver permitted the antenna system to perform an automatic failover and link recovery.