Designed Circularly Polarized Two-Port Microstrip MIMO Antenna for WLAN Applications

The proposed work describes a corner square-cut square-patch multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna with reduced mutual coupling for circular polarization (CP). A two-port MIMO-CP antenna was designed and operated at 5.6 GHz for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. The dimensions of the MIMO-CP antenna were 22.5×50mm2(0.43λ0×0.933λ0) and the FR4 substrate height was 1.6 mm. Between the two-elements, the edge-to-edge distance was 12.2 mm (0.227 λ0), where λ0 was the free space wavelength at 5.6 GHz. A slot was created in the middle of the ground in the proposed MIMO antenna to reduce mutual coupling and improve CP. The ground slot improves impedance matching and provides a better S-parameter and axial ratio (AR), according to the antenna results. According to the simulated results, the proposed antenna bandwidth of 5.23–6.42 GHz (21.4%) for S11 were <−10 dB, isolation was −37 dB with a peak gain of 6 dB and AR ≤3 dB from 5.37 to 5.72 GHz (6.25%). The proposed antennas are simple to fabricate, have low profiles, are inexpensive, have good isolation, and are CP. The diversity gain (DG) and envelop correlation coefficient (ECC) results are better in the simulated frequency band. A MIMO-CP antenna geometry prototype is built and measured for comparison, yielding good results when compared to the simulated and measured results. The MIMO-CP antenna, as designed, is suitable for WLAN applications.