Characteristic mode based self isolated MIMO antenna design for millimeter wave 5G communications

Abstract

The paper introduces a self-isolated quad-port multi input multi output antenna system designed for fifth-generation wireless communication. The reported antenna structure possesses an overall dimension of 12.4 × 12.4 × 0.508 mm3 and is derived from a single-element antenna, featuring a circular patch accompanied by a sectoral slot. To achieve the desired frequency band, an additional circular patch is purposefully placed over the main radiator. The development of each design stage in the antenna structure is investigated using the theory of characteristic mode. This configured multi-element antenna structure achieves a broad operational bandwidth spanning 4.5 GHz, encompassing frequencies from 26.1 GHz to 30.6 GHz, rendering the antenna well-suited for deployment in the millimeter-wave frequency bands of n257, n258, and n261 respectively. A total gain of 6.27 dBi is achieved with port isolation of −24 dB. Furthermore, the antenna undergoes validation for diversity metrics, including envelope correlation coefficient, diversity gain, channel capacity loss, total active reflection coefficient, and mean effective gain. The antenna is fabricated and experimentally validated with the simulated counterpart. Later, a comparative analysis has been conducted which revealed that the proposed antenna demonstrates > 80 % increase in compactness compared to existing antenna designs documented in the literature.