Essay: Understanding Antennas And Wireless Technologies: A Comprehensive Guide." (70 Characters)

1. Different antenna, such as yagi, horn, and cellular antennas, etc. has different merits. Research these technologies in details and pay specific attention to how they are used as well their strengths and weakness. Provide an opinion regarding which antenna types will become the dominant players in the future of medium- and long-distance wireless links.
2. A local engineering group ask you to present your finding of the most recent advanced wireless technologies. Research any THREE different wireless network protocols in details and pay specific attention to how they are used as well their strengths and weakness. What security challenges they are facing? Provide a report of your opinion.

A transducer that converts radio frequency field into alternating current is known as antenna. An antenna acts as an interface between the propagating radio waves through space. It is a metallic structure mainly used for capturing and transmitting the electromagnetic waves and the radio waves (Han et al., 2015). In basic words, it can be described as a conductor used for sending and receiving the signals that include microwave, radio signals and satellite signals. Yagi, Horn and cellular antenna are discussed in the following sections.  

A directional antenna Yagi is made up of several short rods mounted in a pole like structure. A typical Yagi antenna consists of two to three straight elements of antennas with a length of half the electrical wavelength.  The structure of Yagi is represented below

One of the significant benefits of Yagi antenna is that it is direction specific that directs the signal in a particular cardinal or set direction. The strength and weaknesses of Yagi antenna is discussed in the following sections.

Strength

1. It can be implemented easily as it is compact in size and light in weight.
2.  The use of yagi antenna is cost effective and is simple to build and mount as well.

Weakness

1. The bandwidth is reduced if more number of te director elements are used in a single array.
2. Yagi antenna is sensible to frequency which is its disadvantage as well.

An antenna that consists of a flaring meta waveguide and is shaped as a horn is termed as horn antenna (Garcia et al., 2013). This type of antenna is mainly used for transmission of microwave signals. The picture below represents the structure of horn (Sun et al., 2013).

The horn antenna has derived its name from its characteristics flared like appearance. The strength is that is delivers an accurate directivity while that of the weakness is that it cannot be used for a directive beam.

The cellular antenna is used for establishing the signal connection between the cellular devices. It converts tan electrical signal to radio waves. Cellular antennas are widely used across the world (Zhao, Ying & He, 2015).

The advantages or strength of this type of antenna is that it helps in establishing connection over a large range. The weakness is that the initial cost of implementation is quite high.

On evaluating the three different types of antennas, it can be said that the cellular antenna will be used is future as well and will remain a dominant player.

Wireless technology is currently gaining a lot of popularity mainly because of its ease of use. It eliminates the need of installing wired networks for data transfer and hence it is being used in different application. The three recent wireless technologies that will be discussed are ZigBee, WiGig and RFID.

RFID make use of electromagnetic environment or field that automatically identifies and tracks the tags associated with the RFID enabled objects (Lu et al., 2015). It is an acronym for Radio Frequency Identification that makes use of a technology that encodes digital data in RFID tags. A basic RFID consists of RFID tags, antenna and a RFID reader. The Strength and weakness of RFID are as follows-

Strength

The strengths of RFID are as follows-

1. It is easy to install an RFID tag or equipment or an animal.
2. This technology is an advanced form of barcode technology and can be easily replicated.

Weakness

The Weaknesses of RFID tags are as follows-

1. The initial implementation cost of RFID is too high.
2. Tracking an individual without his knowledge might give rise to certain security and privacy issues.

Apart from this, the RFID is associated with certain security challenges as well. The security challenge arises when an unauthorized individual intercepts a data from RFID tags while it is being transmitted.

Yagi Antenna

ZigBee is another most commonly used wireless technologies that are used in establishing link over a short range (Han et al., 2014). The strength and weakness of ZigBee are discussed in the following section.

Strength

The strengths of ZigBee technology are as follows-

1. The strength of ZigBee is that it provides a low power and low data rate wirless system
2. ZigBee is easy to monitor and control.

Weakness

The Weaknesses of ZigBee are as follows-

1. It is not as secure as WiFi
2. The technology has a limited coverage area and therefore can only be used in indoor wireless applications.

Apart from this, there are a number of security issues associated with ZigBee as it can be easily compromised.

WiGig is a technology that enables faster wireless internet connection for the digital devices. The strengths and weakness of WiGig are as follows (Tomkins et al., 2015)-

Strength

1. Provides a high rate of data transfer.
2. It requires a considerably low latency for operation

Weakness

1. The range of WiGig is limited
2. Cost of implementation is higher (Tomkins et al., 2015).

On evaluating the three wireless technologies, it is inferred that WiGig technology might become a dominant player in future.

Software defined networking has a capability of revolutionizing the mode of operation of wireless networks. Software defined networking therefore has a huge role to play in telecommunication network. Experimental results prove that the use of software defined networking helps in network virtualization thereby increasing the capacity of the mobile networks to provide the services quite faster. The software defined networking therefore enables the administrators of the network to control and administer the network traffic in a centralized manner (Bernardos et al., 2014). However, the SDN network us in need for certain standardization efforts to enhance the results. Standardization efforts is therefore considered as a key building blocks  for the communication industry. Software defined networking will help in shaping the way a telecommunication network or services is defined. It has been observed that the use of software defined networking often enables a revolutionary forward thinking in the field of telecommunication (Bernardos et al., 2014). Since software defined networking segregates the control along with the data forwarding planes it helps in quicker provisioning and configuration of the mobile devices.

There is a need for software development networking in telecommunication mainly because the telecommunication sector can face a number of challenges due to the presence of the inflexible and expensive network (Rangisetti &Tamma, 2017). SDN is a physical segregation of the control plane of the network and the forwarding plane. Software defined networking is an approach of cloud computing that mainly facilitates the network management in order to enable a pragmatically efficient network. This in turn improves the performance and the monitoring process. The SDN approach makes use of open stack protocols in order to control the edges of the network for accessing the network switches and the routers (Rangisetti &Tamma, 2017). There is a difference between the wired and wireless network structure and therefore there is an urgent need of incorporating software defined networking in telecommunications. The increasing demand for higher rates of data transfer in mobile network increases the need for making use of software defined networking in telecommunication.

References

Bernardos, C. J., Oliva, A. d. l., Serrano, P., Banchs, A., Contreras, L. M., Jin, H., & Zuniga, J. C. (2014). An architecture for software defined wireless networking. IEEE Wireless Communications, 21(3), 52-61. doi: 10.1109/MWC.2014.6845049

Chandran, S. (Ed.). (2013). Adaptive antenna arrays: trends and applications. Springer Science & Business Media.

Garcia, C. R., Rumpf, R. C., Tsang, H. H., & Barton, J. H. (2013). Effects of extreme surface roughness on 3D printed horn antenna. Electronics Letters, 49(12), 734-736.

Han, J., Choi, C. S., Park, W. K., Lee, I., & Kim, S. H. (2014). Smart home energy management system including renewable energy based on ZigBee and PLC. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 60(2), 198-202.

Han, S., Chih-Lin, I., Xu, Z., & Rowell, C. (2015). Large-scale antenna systems with hybrid analog and digital beamforming for millimeter wave 5G. IEEE Communications Magazine, 53(1), 186-194.

Lu, X., Wang, P., Niyato, D., Kim, D. I., & Han, Z. (2015). Wireless networks with RF energy harvesting: A contemporary survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 17(2), 757-789.

Rangisetti, A. K., &Tamma, B. R. (2017). Software Defined Wireless Networks: A Survey of Issues and Solutions. Wireless Personal Communications, 97(4), 6019-6053. doi: 10.1007/s11277-017-4825-8

Sun, H., Guo, Y. X., He, M., & Zhong, Z. (2013). A dual-band rectenna using broadband Yagi antenna array for ambient RF power harvesting. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 12, 918-921.

Tomkins, A., Poon, A., Juntunen, E., El-Gabaly, A., Temkine, G., To, Y. L., ... & Abdellatif, A. (2015). A 60 GHz, 802.11 ad/WiGig-compliant transceiver for infrastructure and mobile applications in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 50(10), 2239-2255.

Zhao, K., Ying, Z., & He, S. (2015, May). Antenna designs of smart watch for cellular communications by using metal belt. In Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), 2015 9th European Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE.