Conformal Beam-Steering Antenna Controlled by a Raspberry Pi for Sustained High-Throughput Applications

A complete autonomous system consisting of a beam-steerable hemispherical square-loop antenna (HSLA) controlled by a Raspberry Pi is presented for optimizing the throughput in a scattered and a poor signal-to-noise ratio environment. Four different indoor communication configurations at various distances were analyzed in the presence of interferences. In three configurations, HSLA performance was also compared to that of a standard monopole antenna link. It was found that HSLA can offer up to 1450% higher throughput and can withstand much higher interference levels before the system breaks. In terms of quality, this means sustaining compressed high-definition communications. In effect, it improves the system throughput for the test 2.4 GHz (802.11b/g/n) WiFi band. The uniqueness about the system is that it only uses single antenna for both sensing and communication. The algorithm works at application layer that controls the RF switch and antenna patterns at physical layer. Thus, the entire middle protocol layers are untouched. The system can easily be retrofitted to the existing nonadaptive communication systems.