A Comprehensive Study on Next-Generation Electromagnetics Devices and Techniques for Internet of Everything (IoE)

Abstract

Evolution of mobile broadband is ensured by adopting a unified and more capable radio interface (RI). For ubiquitous connectivity among a wide variety of wireless applications, the RI enables the adoption of an adaptive bandwidth with high spectrum flexibility. To this end, the modern-day communication system needs to cater to extremely high bandwidth, starting from below 1 GHz to 100 GHz, based on different deployments. This instigates the creation of a platform called the Internet of Everything (IoE), which is based on the concept of all-round connectivity involving humans to different objects or things via sensors. In simple words, IoE is the intelligent connection of people, processes, data, and things. To enable seamless connectivity, IoE resorts to low-cost, compact, and flexible broadband antennas, RFID-based sensors, wearable electromagnetic (EM) structures, circuits, wireless body area networks (WBAN), and the integration of these complex elements and systems. IoE needs to ensure broader information dissemination via simultaneous transmission of data to multiple users through separate beams and to that end, it takes advantage of metamaterials. The precise geometry and arrangement of metamaterials enable smart properties capable of manipulating EM waves and essentially enable the metamaterial devices to be controlled independently to achieve desirable EM characteristics, such as the direction of propagation and reflection. This review paper presents a comprehensive study on next-generation EM devices and techniques, such as antennas and circuits for wearable and sub 6 GHz 5G applications, WBAN, wireless power transfer (WPT), the direction of arrival (DoA) of propagating waves, RFID based sensors for biomedical and healthcare applications, new techniques of metamaterials as well as transformation optics (TO) and its applications in designing complex media and arbitrary geometry conformal antennas and optical devices that will enable future IoE applications.