Dual Band MIMO Antenna With Decoupling Structure for 5G and WiFi Applications

The work in the current paper introduces a novel Dual-band, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna suitable for 5G and Wi-Fi applications, operating within frequency bands of 3.2GHz to 4.1GHz and 5.2GHz to 5.68GHz, having bandwidths of 800MHz and 480MHz respectively. The proposed antenna configuration utilizes a 2×2 array on FR-4 substrate measuring 64 × 98 × 1.6 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup>. Essentials of the design include two semi-circle slots one rectangular slot above the substrate and at the rear face of the substrate, there is an etched ‘U’ shaped slot. Moreover, high isolation of <−20dB is realized by incorporating a decoupling structure on the upper layer of the substrate. Performance measurements in the specified operating ranges indicate the optimum increase in gain of 4.25 dB and 4.12 dB at 3.6 GHz and 5.5 GHz, respectively, while the radiation efficiency exceeds 70. The proposed antenna’s performance is assessed through key channel parameters, like Channel Capacity Loss (CCL), Diversity Gain (DG), Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC) and Total Active Reflection Coefficient (TARC). The testing of the proposed antenna found that CCL was below 0.4 bits/s/Hz, DG was greater than 9.98, ECC was below 0.005, and TARC was below −10dB in all the operational frequency bands.