A crossed-polarized four port MIMO antenna for UWB communication

Heliyon. 2022 Dec 29;9(1):e12710. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e12710. eCollection 2023 Jan.

Abstract

This paper presents a compact, crossed-polarized, ultra-wideband (UWB) four-ports multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) printed antenna. The proposed antenna is constructed from four microstrip circular patch elements fed by a 50-Ω microstrip line. Two metamaterial cell elements, in the form of a rectangular concentric double split ring resonator (SRR), are placed at the upper plane of the substrates for bandwidth improvement and isolation enhancement. The ultra-wideband frequency response is achieved using a defective ground plane. Surface current flow between the antenna's four elements is limited to ensure maximum isolation. The four-port MIMO system is designed with orthogonal antenna elements orientation on an FR4 substrate with a loss tangent of 0.02 and an overall size of 30 mm × 30 mm × 1.6 mm. Such orientation resulted in less than -17dB port-to-port isolation and an impedance bandwidth of 148% (3.1-12 GHz). The proposed UWB-MIMO antenna achieved a maximum realized gain of 6.2dBi with an efficiency of 87%. The measured and simulated results are in good agreement over the operating frequency band (3.1-12 GHz). The results also provide overall good diversity performance with the TARC < -10 dB, ECC < 0.001, DG > 9.9, MEG < -3 dB and CCL <0.1. The proposed antenna is well-suited for applications in WLAN, WIMAX and GPRs.

Keywords: Correlation coefficient; Cross-polarized elements; Metamaterials; Mutual coupling; UWB-MIMO.