Design of CPW-Fed Dual-Band Four-Element MIMO Microstrip Patch Antenna for WLAN/WiMAX Applications

Abstract

the goal of our study is to design, fabricate, and verify a dual band 4-element MIMO antenna that can address both the WLAN and the WiMAX bands. The suggested antenna is made up of two radiating patches that work together to operate in the 5.8 GHz WLAN and 3.5/5.5 GHz WiMAX bands. The four element MIMO antenna with size of 64×64 mm2 is fabricated on a 1.6 mm in thickness FR-4 sheet with a dielectric constant of 4.4 and a loss tangent of 0.02. To boost the performance of the structure in respect to operating bandwidth; a parametric study was done based on FDTD technique resulting in an optimized dual band antenna. Moreover, a four element MIMO configuration separately 50Ω-fed is considered, and the prototype is fabricated and measured using VNA. Spatial diversity is introduced in the MIMO configuration resulting in good isolation without employing the known decoupling structures and techniques. The measurements reveal that the system operates on two desired bands with a coupling of less than -15 dB between the different elements. In addition, the MIMO metrics are analyzed and found to meet the practical standards of: ECC < 0.04, DG > 9.80, -12 dB < MEG < -3 dB, TARC < -10 dB, and CCL < 0.4 bits/s/Hz over the concerned bands.