Design and experimental verification of fractal based MIMO antenna for lower sub 6-GHz 5G applications

This article presents fractal shape based MIMO antenna with microstrip feeding for sub 6-GHz applications. The proposed fractal based structure is a flower-shaped construct with added rectangular strips patch and circular, rectangular slots are introduced into the ground plane to reduce the isolation between the patches. The main purpose in designing 2 x 1 MIMO system antenna is to enhance the scattering signals and optimize the performance. The proposed structure uses FR-4 material with a dimension of 25 mm x 38 mm. The 2 x 1 MIMO structure resonate at 3.5 GHz for the sub 6 GHz 5 G communications with directional radiation pattern. The performance characteristics of the antenna such as surface current distributions, radiation patterns and S-parameters are investigated. In addition the performance of diversity system of MIMO structure including the total active reflection coefficient (TARC), multiplexing efficiency, envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) and diversity gain (DG) are studied. For this proposed MIMO structure all antenna parameters are found that within an acceptable range.