Performance Assessment of a Star Patch Antenna based on RSSI Level in Actual Indoor Environments

This paper presents a design of star patch antenna with microstrip line feeding structure, which operates at 2.4 GHz. The antenna is printed on FR-4 board having dielectric constant of 4.4. The performance of antenna is evaluated based on the reflection loss and radiation pattern. The measurements of antenna return loss is done in the laboratory, while the radiation pattern is measured by connecting the developed antenna to the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader in Line of Sight (LOS) indoor environment. The RSSI value is captured by the RFID reader at 10° steps from 0° to 360° and the polar radiation pattern can be plotted. From the measurement, it is observed that the developed antenna is able to support data transmission and reception up to 69 meters distance with maximum input power + 5 dBm. The result shows good agreement between measured data and calculated values, which can be used as a reference for future design.