Efficiency of Millimeter Wave Mobile Terminal Antennas with the Influence of Users

The effect of users on the efficiency of mobile terminal antennas at 15GHz, 28GHz and 60GHz is studied in this paper. It is performed using three four-element planar arrays. The first operates at 15GHz with a bandwidth of 0.74 GHz, the second at 28GHz with a bandwidth of 2.5 GHz and finally the third antenna at 60GHz with bandwidth of 12.5 GHz. The effect of a user’s finger is studied when being placed on four different locations over each antenna element, with six distances between the antenna and user’s index finger. The losses due to the increased shadowing are studied in terms of radiation efficiency (RE), matching efficiency (ME) and two additional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) parameters, i.e., envelop correlation coefficient (ECC) and multiplexing efficiency (MUX). For antennas operating at 28 and 60 GHz, the minimum frequency shift is observed when the finger is placed at 1.5 mm distance from the antenna, whereas for 15 GHz, the minimum resonance shift is observed when the finger is at 2 mm distance. Losses of up to 80% and 70% are observed for RE and MUX, respectively, when the finger is placed at 0 mm for all antennas compared to the case without user (WU). Finally, it is observed that the ME and ECC losses are insignificant regardless of the antenna and finger variation.