TRI-BAND FOUR-ELEMENT MIMO ANTENNA WITH HIGH ISOLATION

Abstract

A tri-band four-element MIMO (multiple-input-multiple- output) antenna with high isolation is presented. The MIMO antenna consists of four symmetrical antenna elements. To relieve the degradation of the operation bandwidth caused by the strong mutual coupling among the four antenna elements, four symmetrical rectangles are removed from the four corners of the ground plane, respectively. The efiect of the cutting of the four rectangles on the isolation is slight. Two kinds of isolation structure are applied to reduce the mutual coupling among the elements. The flrst kind of isolation consists of two slits and a protruded ground branch, and the second kind of isolation structure consists of four symmetrical slits etched into the ground plane. The mutual coupling caused by surface currents is reduced by slits, the mutual coupling resulted from near-fleld is suppressed by the ground branches, and thus high isolation for the MIMO antenna is achieved. Moreover, the efiects of the slits and the ground branches on the operation bandwidth are slight, thus the operation bandwidth and the mutual coupling can be controlled independently, to some degree. A tri-band operation bandwidth (2.34{2.95GHz, 3.38{3.75GHz, and 4.4{6.7GHz) with VSWR • 2 and isolation ‚ 20dB, is achieved. The results, including S-parameters, radiation patterns, mean efiective gain (MEG), radiation e-ciency and signal correlations, indicate that the proposed MIMO antenna can provide spatial or pattern diversity to increase data capacity of wireless communication systems.