Optimizing Concentric Circular Antenna Arrays for High-Altitude Platforms Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has gained interest in many applications and it becomes important to improve its performance. Antennas and communication performance are most important issues of WSN. In this paper, an adaptive concentric circular array (CCA) is proposed to improve the link between the sink and sensor nodes. This technique is applied to the new High – Altitude Platform (HAP) Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The proposed array technique is applied for two coverage scenarios; a wider coverage cell of 30 km radius and a smaller cell of 8 km radius. The feasibility of the link is discussed where it shows the possibility of communications between the HAP sink station and sensor nodes located on the ground. The proposed CCA array is optimized using a modified Dolph-Chebyshev feeding function. A comparison with conventional antenna models in literature shows that the link performance in terms of bit energy to noise power spectral density ratio can be improved by up to 11.37 dB for cells of 8 km radius and 16.8 dB in the case of 30 km radius cells that make the link at 2.4 GHz feasible and realizable compared to using conventional antenna techniques.