Compact dual wide-band four/eight elements MIMO antenna for WLAN applications

A compact four and eight elements multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna designed for WLAN applications is presented in this article. The antenna operates in IEEE 802.11b/g WLAN (2.4 GHz), IEEE 802.11 ac/n WLAN (5.2 and 5.8 GHz) and WiMAX (5.8 GHz) bands. The resonated mode of the antenna is achieved by two unequal Reverse-L shaped, line-shaped slots on top and parasitic element on the ground layer. The single antenna provides wide bandwidth of about 29% (2.3-3.1 GHz) in lower and 22% (4.9-6.1 GHz) in the upper band. The compactness of the single element antenna is found about 95% with respect to the patch and 61% in overall dimension. Thereafter an investigation is carried out to design two, four, and eight elements MIMO antennas. All of the multi-element structures provide compact configuration and cover entire WLAN frequency ranges (2.4-2.48 and 5.15-5.85 GHz). The dimension of the proposed eight element MIMO antenna is 102 x 52 x 1.6 mm(3). It covers the frequency (measured) from 2.4 to 3.1 GHz and 5 to 6.1 GHz. The diversity performance of the proposed MIMO antenna is also assessed in terms of the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), and total active reflection co-efficient (TARC). The ECC is found 9.0 is obtained for the desired bands.