Dual band transparent antenna for wireless MIMO system applications

A dual-band optically transparent antenna based on a slotted interconnected ring resonator as an efficient radiating element is proposed. The compact radiating element and partial ground plane are structured on a plexiglass substrate with Silver Tin Oxide as transparent conducting material. The radiation disadvantage of OTAs due to the low conductivity of conductive oxides has been overcome with the gain improvement technique of 2 x 1 antenna array design. The overall sizes of the proposed single element and 2 x 1 two element array antennas are lambda/2.5 x lambda/2.5 and lambda/1.19 x lambda/2.08 at the lower resonance frequency of 2.4 GHz, respectively. The operation bands of both OTA prototypes cover WLAN and WiMAX frequency bands with permissible bandwidth and sufficient gain therefore the 2 x 1 antenna array is utilized as one of two dual-band antennas of a 2 x 2 MIMO transceiver system for WLAN and WiMAX band operations.