Abstract
A flexible transparent wideband four-element MIMO antenna with a connected ground plane is proposed with numerical computation and experimental measurement studies. The optical transparency is obtained using flexible conductive oxide material AgHT-4 and Melinex substrate. The radiating elements are in the form of circular stub-loaded C-shaped resonators, which are positioned in a carefully structured flexible Melinex substrate with an interconnected partial ground plane structured in the form of an L-shaped resonator, attaining an overall antenna size of 0.33λ × 0.48λ at the lowest operating frequency. The proposed antenna spans over a.10 dB impedance bandwidth of 2.21-6 GHz (92.32%) with an isolation level greater than 15dB among all elements. The maximum gain is 0.53dBi with a minimum efficiency of 41%, respectively which is satisfactory considering flexible structure and sheet impedance of 4Ω/sq. MIMO antenna parameters in terms of the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) and diversity gain (DG) are also extracted where all the values are satisfactory for MIMO applications. The bending analysis of the proposed transparent MIMO antenna along the X and Y axis has revealed good performance in terms of scattering parameters and radiation pattern along with MIMO diversity performance. All of these technical points make the flexible MIMO antenna suitable for smart devices using sub-6 GHz 5G and WLAN band in IoT applications where visual clutter and co-site location issues need to be mitigated with the integration ease of conformal placement on the curved component/device surfaces.
Highlights
The emergence of 5G that provides minimal latency and allows a larger volume of data transfer has become one of the backbones for wireless communications [1]
Numerous nontransparent wideband MIMO antennas have been proposed using different structures such as L-shaped slot [7], inverted-F patch geometry [8], monopole [9], inverted L-shaped monopole [10], inverted L-shaped monopole with SRR [11], the circular metallic disc [12], integrated balun with dipole [13], and square rings coupled through proximity feed [14]
We focus on providing an alternative solution for the connected ground plane in a flexible transparent MIMO planar monopole antenna
Summary
The emergence of 5G that provides minimal latency and allows a larger volume of data transfer has become one of the backbones for wireless communications [1]. Numerous nontransparent wideband MIMO antennas have been proposed using different structures such as L-shaped slot [7], inverted-F patch geometry [8], monopole [9], inverted L-shaped monopole [10], inverted L-shaped monopole with SRR [11], the circular metallic disc [12], integrated balun with dipole [13], and square rings coupled through proximity feed [14] All of these have been designed with a connected ground as a requirement for a MIMO system [15]. Antennas in [22,29] are transparent and flexible where [29] has superior performance with 4 elements due to the use of highly conductive NI metallic mesh grown using the electro deposition technique It is not covering the desired sub-6 GHz band whereas [22] covers the desired band but it uses a thick substrate with only 2 elements of MIMO configuration. MIMO antenna parameters are calculated in terms of ECC, and DG, where all the numerically computed and experimentally measured results are satisfying the ideal values , stated in the operation standards under normal and bent conditions along two axes as suggested in [30,31,32]
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