Four-Element Metamaterial Antenna with Wide Bandwidth for mm-Wave 5G MIMO Applications

In this work, a 2 × 2 four-port Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna with a metasurface array for mm-Wave 5G MIMO applications is proposed. The four-port MIMO antenna has a compact size of 20 × 20 × 7.15 mm3 and is realized with a Rogers Duroid 5880 dielectric layer 0.78 mm thick used as substrate and a Rogers RO3010 dielectric layer 1.65 mm thick used as superstrate at distance 5.5 mm above the radiation elements. Each one of the four radiation elements is composed of a square cut-at-the-corners patch antenna. In addition, negative refractive index metasurface array structure is used at the same level with the radiation elements. As a result, the impedance bandwidth and the isolation are improved significantly. The performance of the antenna is investigated in terms of reflection coefficient, impedance bandwidth, radiation characteristics, Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) and Mean Effective Gain (MEG). The proposed four-port metamaterial antenna achieves impedance bandwidth of 7.98 GHz (24.52-32.5 GHz) or 27.51%, an overall Peak Realized Gain of 12.1 dB while simulated ECC between antenna elements is lower than 0.03. Overall, the antenna is a good candidate for mm-Wave 5G MIMO Applications.