Designing a Novel Hybrid Technique Based on Enhanced Performance Wideband Millimeter-Wave Antenna for Short-Range Communication

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a performance-improved 4-port multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) antenna proposed for millimeter-wave applications, especially for short-range communication systems. The antenna exhibits compact size, simplified geometry, and low profile along with wide bandwidth, high gain, low coupling, and a low Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC). Initially, a single-element antenna was designed by the integration of rectangular and circular patch antennas with slots. The antenna is superimposed on a Roger RT/Duroid 6002 with total dimensions of 17 × 12 × 1.52 mm3. Afterward, a MIMO configuration is formed along with a novel decoupling structure comprising a parasitic patch and a Defected Ground Structure (DGS). The parasitic patch is made up of strip lines with a rectangular box in the center, which is filled with circular rings. On the other side, the DGS is made by a combination of etched slots, resulting in separate ground areas behind each MIMO element. The proposed structure not only reduces coupling from −17.25 to −44 dB but also improves gain from 9.25 to 11.9 dBi while improving the bandwidth from 26.5–30.5 GHz to 25.5–30.5 GHz. Moreover, the MIMO antenna offers good performance while offering strong MIMO performance parameters, including ECC, diversity gain (DG), channel capacity loss (CCL), and mean effective gain (MEG). Furthermore, a state-of-the-art comparison is provided that results in the overperforming results of the proposed antenna system as compared to already published work. The antenna prototype is also fabricated and tested to verify software-generated results obtained from the electromagnetic (EM) tool HFSS.