A CPW fed quad-port MIMO DRA for sub-6 GHz 5G applications

Abstract

The present work investigates a novel four-port, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), single element dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) for sub-6 GHz band. The DRA is designed and fabricated into a symmetric cross shape and fed using a coplanar waveguide (CPW) feed. A single radiator with four ports is rarely found in the literature. The -10 dB impedance bandwidth covered by the antenna is from 5.52 GHz to 6.2 GHz (11.6%) which covers fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR) bands N47 and wireless local area network (WLAN) IEEE 802.11a band. The isolation between orthogonal ports is about 15 dB while the isolation between opposite ports is 12 dB. The radiation pattern of the proposed antenna is bidirectional due to the absence of a ground plane below the DRA. The orthogonal modes excited in the DRA are TEδ21x and TE2δ1y through the four symmetrical CPW feeds. The simulated and measured results of the proposed design show that MIMO characteristics are achieved by pattern diversity between the ports. Due to the perfect symmetry of the design, the proposed work could be extended to MIMO array applications as well.