Automatic Antenna Beam Selection for Optimal Cellular User Coverage

Reconfigurable antennas are antennas designed to have multiple radiation patterns. They utilize omnidirectional antennas and enable them to exhibit directional patterns by integrating parasitic elements to alter the fields produced by the effective aperture and a switching system to enable these elements. In this paper, the switching system was given automation in changing a base station antenna's beam pattern in response to an area's user density that was measured by an Integrated Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). The setup was connected to an Arduino Mega 1280 programmed for tracking of number of users in an area. After the data was fed to the antenna, another microcontroller compared it from the different setups and directed the beams to the area with the highest user density. The antenna was able to automatically switch its radiation pattern when the number of users in different locations were varied. These antennas are seen useful (1) for deployments in areas with insufficient and unstable power supply and with changing user distribution, and (2) for user's presence tracking in case of emergencies.