Isolation Improvement of MIMO Antenna Using Novel EBG and Hair-Pin Shaped DGS at 5G Millimeter Wave Band

This paper proposes a hybrid decoupling method based on a novel electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure and hair-pin shaped defected ground structure (DGS) to obtain high isolation between 2-element multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna at 5G millimeter wave band over 27.5-28.35 GHz. The proposed EBG designed on stacked dielectric substrates, achieves a wide frequency band-gap between 26.2-32.03 GHz (20 %). A 2 x 3 array of the EBG is arranged between two electromagnetically coupled radiating patches in order to suppress the surface wave coupling. Substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) feeding network and cavity are strategically incorporated in the antenna design for improving the radiation performance and minimizing the losses from the feed. EBG shows an average isolation improvement of 13.9 dB within 5G band as compared to unloaded MIMO antenna. The additional reduction in coupling is achieved by placing hair-pin DGS (HP-DGS) on the ground plane, resulting in maximum isolation improvement of 47.7 dB at 27.94 GHz. The prototype of the MIMO was fabricated and experimentally verified. Measured peak isolation between the antennas is obtained as 71.9 dB, having a gain of 9 dBi and front to back ratio (FTBR) of 19.8 dB. A good diversity performance is also noticed for the designed MIMO with envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) of 0.00015, diversity gain (DG) of 9.99, and channel capacity loss (CCL) of 0.025 bits/Hz/sec. Later, SIW corporate feed network is designed for 4-element linear array loaded with EBG and HP-DGS to achieve higher gain and narrow beamwidth. The array was fabricated and the measured results are found in good accordance with the simulation results. The peak gain, beamwidth, and FTBR of the array are 13.3 dBi, 16.2 degrees, and 19.97 dB respectively.