MIMO Antenna for UWB Communications

Abstract

Design of ultra-wideband antennas is challenging in the stringent requirements that are often conflicting to achieve a wide impedance bandwidth while maintaining high radiation efficiency, uniform gain and compact size. A Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna system can enhance the overall antenna performance but at having to overcome new challenges such as reducing the mutual coupling and the correlation between the elements. A printed circular disc compact planar antenna is selected in this work due to its UWB performance and compact size for the MIMO antenna system. A parametric analysis is carried out to achieve an optimal design. The system developed consists of two elements with an overall size of 59 × 27 mm. The designed antenna system operates over the whole of the UWB bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with radiation efficiency up to 85% and reflection coefficients less that ?10 dB. The envelope correlation is less than ?60 dB throughout the UWB band while the diversity gain approaches 10 throughout the entire UWB bandwidth and Total Active Reflection Coefficient (TARC) between the antenna elements is less ?11 dB. Thus the proposed MIMO antenna outperforms similar antenna systems reported in the literature.