Design of a Miniaturized UHF-Band Zigbee Antenna

Applicable to the M2M/IoT Communication

Jinsu Jeon, Kyeongnam Jang, Sungtek Kahng Changlim Park

Dept. of Information & Telecommunication Engineering, Simplex
Incheon National University Incheon, Korea
Incheon, Korea crparkone@naver.com
{jjs6246, jkn626, s-kahng}@incheon.ac.kr

Abstract—In this paper, a miniature UHF-band Zigbee antenna is
proposed. Considering a lighter weight and smaller footprint of
the Zigbee platform attached to a walking person, the antenna is
meandered on the top and partially short circuited on the bottom,
and optimized with non-uniform widths and lengths of the
radiating element, and capillary paths. Due to these contributing
factors, the physical area is reduced by roughly 50% from the
simple monopole antenna. Besides, the bandwidth of 20 MHz is
obtained for the resonance frequency of 915 MHz, working
appropriately for the UHF-band Zigbee application such as M2M
and IoT. The full-wave simulation with the measurement verifies
the proposed design.
bandwidth which is hard to achieve with the very limited
footprint and cheap 1-layer microstrip-line fabrication. Besides,
the antenna gain is over 0 dBi that is treated as a usable value,
considering the negative numbers of other miniaturized UHF-
band antennas. The simulation is carried out with the
measurement to confirm the design scheme.
II. THE PROPOSED CHIP ANTENNA
Fig.1 is the geometrical shape of the proposed chip antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION
The M2M(Machine to Machine) communication emerged
very lately and has evolved and expanded to the concept of the
IoT(Internet of Things), which is thought of as a driving force
for next generation economic and industrial prosperity. The
link between devices as the things in the IoT, whether nearby
human beings are conscious or not, can take place through
short-range wireless communication like the Zigbee, NFC,
Bluetooth, or what not. In particular, the Zigbee has been
adopted a lot and broadened its horizons in the fields of a. Proposed structure b. Ordinary monopole
wireless link, relay, real-time locating[1].
Fig. 1 The proposed Zigbee antenna and ordinary one
Zigbee is possible to work with the 2-GHz or 900-MHz
regime. More often than not, since the 2 GHz-band is crowded As shown Fig. 1 a, the proposed antenna has a non-uniform
with other communication services, the operation in the UHF meandered line on the top surface of a 1-mm thick FR4
band is chosen to set up the environment for the IoT. As always, substrate and branching paths crossing the opposite sides of the
the lower the frequency, the greater the antenna size. It is tough line. These are given to adjust the bandwidth in form of a
to design a UHF-band antenna fit for the unchanged platform compact UHF-band antenna. The suggested antenna has
from the 2-GHz application. To decrease the antenna size, a 20mm*20mm as W * L as the size of the radiating element.
number of discrete elements are inserted or the structure is bent
repeatedly in practice. The drawbacks of these techniques are
rising cost due to workmanship and inconvenience in
fabrication, and limit in simple folding and bending[2].
Therefore, a printed and size-reduced antenna is suggested in
this paper for the UHF-band Zigbee communication. Taking
into account the confined space of the practically used platform
to host the antenna, the structure is slightly inspired by a
modified monopole and shaped as the combined form of a a. Proposed structure b. Ordinary monopole
meandered non-uniform line with capillary paths to adjust the Fig. 2 The return loss of the two compared structures
bandwidth, and short-circuiting on the bottom of the FR4
substrate. It turns out that the proposed method brings the size- The proposed antenna is tuned to resonate at 915 MHz as a
reduction effect of nearly 50% in comparison with the simple UHF Zigbee band, and its return loss is the lowest at the target
monopole for the resonance at 915 MHz, and the 20 MHz frequency as shown in Fig. 2 a. If the ordinary monopole in Fig.
1b is determined to have the same resonance frequency, its

978-1-4799-3540-6/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 382 AP-S 2014

Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIV OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY TAXILA. Downloaded on December 15,2021 at 13:22:17 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 length becomes 170mm and area becomes 30mm*30mm.
Therefore, by the proposed scheme, the effect of
miniaturization is over 50%, observing the figures above. The The far-field patterns in Fig. 3 show the omni-directional
bandwidth is read 20 MHz as a useable number. Based upon characteristic in the azimuth plane which is appropriate for
the physical shape and input impedance, the radiation Zigbee based IoT/M2M wireless link. The simulated and
performance is accomplished as follows. measured beam patterns are vey similar. And the antenna gain
is over 0 dBi which enables the transmitted power to reach the
0
devices within the range of 3 meters.
0
330 30 x-z plane 0
-5 0

III. CONCLUSION
330 30 x-y plane
-10 -5
-15 -10
300 60
-20 -15
300 60
-25 -20
-30
-35
-25
-30 In this paper, a miniaturized chip antenna was proposed for
UHF-band Zigbee communication and possible expansion to
-40 270 90 -35
-35 -40 270 90
-30 -35

IoT and M2M. The physical footprint was decreased by more

-25 -30
-20 -25
240 120
-15 -20

than 50% from the ordinary monopole, and the beam-pattern

240 120
-10 -15
-5 -10
210 150 -5
0
180 0
210

180
150
was obtained proper for the Zigbee environment with the
usable gain and bandwidth of 20 MHz at 915 MHz. If this
a. XY-plane b. XZ- plane scheme is incorporated with the metamaterial techniques[3,4],
more advantages will be achieved, and efficiency will increase.

REFERENCES

[1] http://microcontroller.com/ZigBee_Wireless_Networks_for_Industrial_S
System/White_Paper.
[2] Rod Waterhouse, Microstrip Patch Antennas: A Designer's Guide,
Springer, 2003
[3] J. Cho, K. Kim, J. Goo, S. Kahng, G. Jang, and S. Yoo “MIMO(multi
input multi output) antenna without phase variation” 1011333430000
March 2012
c. 3D beam pattern(simulation) d. Measured pattern
[4] J. Kim, J. Cho, S. Kahng, J. Goo, K. Kim, G. Jang, and S. Yoo
Fig. 3 The radiation characteristics of the proposed antenna “Metamaterial MIMO antenna,” 1011540910000, May 2012

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