Antenna Design and Simulation for 2x2 MIMO System for IEEE-802.11a Application

Abstract

The performance and advantages of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antennas such as offering significant increase in data throughput and link range without additional bandwidth or increased transmitted power. Primary reason to use multiple antennas is to improve link quality and reliability. This is important especially for worst channel conditions like multipath fading, shadowing, etc. MIMO techniques are the most important advancements in recent wireless systems. They are a critical part of important standards such as IEEE 802.16, 802.11 and 4G LTE Technologies. The MIMO technology has attracted attention in wireless communications. In this paper, a compact (2x2) MIMO antenna system, the reduction of mutual coupling between the two antenna elements is achieved by using a simple defected ground structure (DGS) between them to limit the surface waves between them. The distance between the two antenna elements is only 0.3?? mm. The proposed antenna works at 5.8 GHz for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. The proposed structure has a rectangular shape using FR-4 substrate with relative permittivity of 4.4. The resulted MIMO antenna is found to have a low mutual coupling of about -20.66 dB. The antenna also has a wide relative bandwidth of 18.75%, high total efficiency of 89.5% and acceptable realized gain of about 5.10 dB. The simulation of the proposed antenna has been carried out using Ansoft HFSS and MATLAB software.