Within this context, horn antennas are radiating structures with relatively high gain and wide bandwidth, while being very robust. However, their costs, manufacturing process, and weights are limiting factors to their extensive use. When compared with dielectric antennas, metal antennas, such as horn, dipoles, loop, slots, etc., due to the low losses of metals, typically allow to obtain more efficient radiating structures, greater gains (as singular elements), and even enable handling greater power levels. Besides, it is highly recommended that antennas are compact, robust, and with a low-cost and fast production. To overcome these communication issues, combating the large propagation loss in mmWaves, it is important to use high gain and highly directional antennas. Several concerns arise with these operation frequencies, essentially due to the huge path-loss and consequent fragile link result of the occurring diffractions. Wider bandwidths are probably the most effective method to provide the data demands for 5G services, thus the migration to the millimeter waves region becomes mandatory. Technology must be able to handle heterogeneous and challenging layouts, always bearing in mind the improvement of both energy and cost efficiencies along with spectrum performance. New techniques to build antennas need to be investigated, to properly create radiation structures in the daily objects.
Given the number of the connected devices, their diversity of nature, sizes, and shapes, the antennas will face multiple challenges with various forms and the combination of several materials. New scenarios such as the proliferation of sensors to deliver IoT services associated to home appliances, health monitoring, smart offices, efficient navigation systems (autonomous cars), immersive multimedia experiences, either through augmented or virtual reality and cloud computing, will all be combined in a typical 5G network. Everything will be monitored, measured, or sensed, and to gather that information, the number of devices interacting with the surroundings will increase exponentially. With the main goal of being a unifying connectivity structure for the next decade and beyond, 5G enables the IoT reality, where a device will be able to maintain connectivity, regardless of time or location. The fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) is driven by an unprecedented growth in the number of connected devices and shared data. The analysis recognizes the vast potential of these 3D-printed structures for IoT applications, as an alternative to producing conventional commercial antennas.
The antenna printed with the conductive filament achieved a better gain than the other structures and showed a larger bandwidth. All prototypes combine good results with low production cost. A third method consists of printing an antenna completely using a conductive filament. Two techniques were used to metallize a structure that was printed with polylactic acid (PLA), one with copper tape and other with a conductive spray-paint. These techniques were applied as an example to pyramidal horn antennas designed for a central frequency of 28 GHz. This paper presents different methods to fabricate typical metal antennas using 3D printing technology. 3D printing technology is a possible solution in this way, as it can print an object with high precision at a reduced cost. With the rise of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and networks operating in the mmWave frequencies, a huge growth of connected sensors will be a reality, and high gain antennas will be desired to compensate for the propagation issues, and with low cost, characteristics inherent to metallic radiating structures.
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