A four port flexible UWB MIMO antenna with enhanced isolation for wearable applications

This article presents a four-port multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) flexible antenna design for Ultrawideband (UWB) application using Polydimethylsiloxanes substrate. The single UWB antenna structure consists of modified circular radiator with elliptical slot and partial ground plane. To achieve high isolation among antenna element, a Defective Ground Structure (DGS) is adopted to decouple the low frequency band. DGS comprises a centrally placed square shape slotted structure connected by horizontal and vertical lines, achieving isolation below −20 dB. The proposed antenna has a dimension of 56 × 41 × 1.6 mm 3 ( 0.41 λ × 0.3 λ × 0.0117 λ ) , bandwidth of 3.4–11.8 GHz (110.5 %) and 4.3 dBi peak gain. Simulation and measurement findings show that the antenna performs well under bending situations with different curvature radius. At 4 GHz and 8.1 GHz, W/kg specific absorption rate (SAR) for 1/10 g tissue is examined. A low value of SAR is obtained at both the resonating frequencies. Additionally, an analysis is conducted on the diversity parameters, and the antenna demonstrates comparatively good results having mean effective gain (MEG) ratio < −3 dB envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) < 0.02, total active reflection coefficient (TARC) < − 10 dB, channel capacity loss (CCL) < 0.3 bps/Hz, and diversity gain (DG) > 9.99 dB, implying that it's appropriate for wearable MIMO applications. • A flexible UWB MIMO antenna based on Polydimethylsiloxanes substrate is designed. • To achieve high isolation, a DGS is adopted to decouple the low frequency band. • The DGS helps in achieving enhanced isolation below −20 dB. • The proposed antenna has a dimension of 0.41 λ × 0.3 λ × 0.0117 λ , bandwidth 110.5 % and 4.3 dBi peak gain. • At 4 GHz and 8.1 GHz, W/kg specific absorption rate (SAR) are found to be well within the acceptable limit.