A Compact DGS Integrated Dual-band Quad-port MIMO Slot Antenna for WLAN Applications

Abstract

In this article, a compact planar dual-band four-element MIMO antenna is proposed for WLAN standards IEEE 802.11n/ac applications. The antenna has a compact footprint of 40 mm × 40 mm.  The compactness is due to the orthogonal arrangement of fouridentical novel dual-band compact antenna elements. The antenna element comprises of microstrip line-fed two monopole slots of different lengths and widths, which are separated at an optimum distance of 0.01λ0.The reactance loading renders the desired compactness of the antenna element by reducing the resonant length of the lower band resonating longer monopole slot to 0.15λs. The miniaturized antenna element resonates at 2.45 (lower band) and 5.4 GHz (higher band) frequency bands. The integrated DGS provides a good decoupling level of 15 and 25 dB in lower and upper bands,respectively despite its compactness and common ground. The MIMO antenna provides an impedance bandwidth of 4% (2.4-2.5 GHz) and 7% (5.4 - 5.9  GHz) in the lower and upper bands, respectively. The proposed design’s diversity performance is verified by computing diversity performance metrics ECC and DG.As the proposed design reports good return loss, radiation, and diversity performance, it can be considered as apotential candidate to deploy in portable wireless devices.