Impact of Decoupling and Depolarization on Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) of 2×2 MIMO Microstrip Antennas

This paper investigates impact of decoupling technique and depolarization diversity on Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) characteristics of 2 × 2 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) microstrip antennas. The ECC value is computed based on scattering parameter data, whereby the scattering parameter of MIMO antennas is used as the input parameters. For this purpose, a configuration of four 2.4 GHz 2×2 MIMO microstrip antennas are developed on an FR4 Epoxy dielectric substrate and characterized using a full-wave electromagnetic simulator. Characterization results demonstrate that the proposed configuration of 2 × 2 MIMO microstrip antennas with combination of decoupling technique and depolarization diversity exhibit the excellent ECC performance. An improvement in ECC value of 0.161 and isolation of 13.8 dB can be achieved in comparison to the conventional configuration at a very close separation of less than 0.3λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> between the antenna elements.