A compact four‐element MIMO antenna for WLAN/WiMAX/satellite applications

Summary This paper presents a four‐element wideband monopole MIMO antenna. Initially, a single‐element wideband CPW‐fed antenna is designed operating in the range of 4.30 to 6.45 GHz. Using this design, an approach towards MIMO structure is studied. A two‐element structure is designed keeping them adjacent to each other, and the isolation between the antennas is observed. After which, a four‐element structure is designed having the best orientation in order to achieve good isolation between the antenna elements. The proposed antenna configuration has four identical CPW‐fed elements. The proposed configuration has a fractional bandwidth of 40.27% and has a simulated peak gain of 5.5 dBi. This antenna is intended to be used for WLAN, WiMAX, and satellite bands of range corresponding to 4.70–6.19, 5.5–5.7, and 5–6 GHz. All the necessary antenna simulations are simulated using Ansys HFSS and verified on NI AWR Design Environment. The fabricated model of the proposed design is measured for its performance parameters and validated. In this research work, a four‐element monopole MIMO antenna is designed to operate in the range of 4.30 to 6.45 GHz. The antenna achieves good isolation without utilizing any decoupling structure (only orthogonal placement of the antenna elements in order to have maximum isolation between the adjacent antenna elements), thus totally benefits from the monopole asymmetrical structure. The antenna is compact with split‐shaped patch, has less complex structure, and achieves better performances as compared with the antenna discussed in literature.