Abstract In this paper, a quadband MIMO diamond-shaped antenna with two highly isolated elements is proposed and discussed. A novel metamaterial cell-inspired decoupling parasitic structure is deployed between the two antenna elements to achieve high isolation greater than 20 dB in the frequency bands of interest. Moreover, the design adopts a defected ground structure and open-ended multiple diamond-shaped branches for multiband characteristics, enabling the proposed MIMO to cover several modern wireless applications. The performance metrics of the proposed MIMO antenna are validated by evaluating various diversity parameters such as envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), total active reflection coefficient (TARC), and channel capacity loss (CCL). This antenna is fabricated on an FR4 substrate with a compact size of 12 × 30 × 1.524 mm (0.082λ 0 × 0.204λ 0 × 0.001λ 0, λ 0 is the wavelength at 2.04 GHz). With the edge-to-edge separation distance of 0.053λ 0 between the antenna elements, its prototype is experimentally measured using a two-port Rohde & Schwarz ZVA50 Vector Network Analyzer. The port-to-port isolation is about −20.87 dB, −23 dB, −25.93 dB, and −25.22 dB for 2.3 GHz, 3.18 GHz, 4.08 GHz, and 5.42 GHz frequency bands, respectively. Also, the proposed MIMO antenna exhibits good diversity performances with the ECC < 0.005, DG > 9.99, and TARC<−10 dB making it an outstanding candidate covering 4G/LTE, 5G NR sub-6 GHz n40/n41/n77/n78, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, ISM, WBAN, Bluetooth, MBAN, WiBro, C-V2X, and UWB applications.