Design of Compact Planar Monopole UWB MIMO Antenna with Four Orthogonal Elements and Tapered Fed Configuration for Wireless Diversity Applications

In this paper, we introduce a four-port self-isolated UWB MIMO antenna for diversity applications. First, we have developed a basic radiating element of the proposed antenna in four stages of design, where patches of geometrically different shapes were added at each stage to arrive at the final radiator form. The antenna was designed on an FR-4 substrate with a compact size of 28 x 28 x 1.6 mm(3). A tapered microstrip feeding was employed to enhance the antenna's impedance matching. An orthogonal arrangement of the four radiators was adopted to mitigate the mutual coupling between them, avoiding the use of a separate isolation structure. A prototype was built and measured with a close agreement between the experimental and simulated results. The MIMO antenna performed well in the entire frequency spectrum of 3.1-10.6 GHz, with an isolation better than 20 dB. The measured envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) was less than 0.001, the diversity gain (DG) was greater than 0.99 dB, and the total active reflection coefficient (TARC) was less than -10 dB. The performance of the proposed antenna design was compared with existing designs. The comparison showed that the proposed quad-element UWB MIMO array is compact, has good isolation and diversity performance compared to existing designs, and is well-suited for wireless diversity applications.