Broadband sub-6 GHz flower-shaped MIMO antenna with high isolation using theory of characteristic mode analysis (TCMA) for 5G NR bands and WLAN applications

A small size neutralization line integrated flower-shaped MIMO antenna is designed and analyzed for sub-6 GHz type 5G NR frequency bands like n79 (4400-5000 MHz), n78 (3300-3800 MHz), n77 (3300-4200 MHz), and WLAN (5150-5825 MHz) applications. The novel approach of theory of characteristic mode analysis (TCMA) is introduced to provide physical insight of the designed structure and its characteristics behavior. Due to the suggested modifications in the geometry, the isolation among the patches is greatly increased. The overall miniaturized dimension of the MIMO antenna is 25 x 40 mm(2). The edge-edge spacing among the elements is 0.0233 lambda. The prototype antenna is fabricated and measured that shows good agreement compared with simulated results. The designed MIMO antenna without the presence of decoupling structure offers an isolation of 28 dB, gain of 3.6 dBi, and radiation efficiency of 69.7% at the resonant frequency. The proposed MIMO antenna covers a broad range of frequency band from 3.296 to 5.962 GHz with -10 dB impedance bandwidth of 2666 MHz and maintains a good isolation of greater than 50 dB for the entire operating band. The tested radiation efficiency and gain are 85.3% and 6.22 dBi at 3.5 GHz. Moreover, the diversity parameters of the neutralization line integrated MIMO antenna, that is, channel capacity loss (CCL) isolation, mean effective gain (MEG), total active reflection coefficient (TARC) diversity gain (DG), and envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), are analyzed and discussed in this article.