Subarray Design with Two Rectangular Elements for Massive MIMO System Development

Wireless communication for the future will use 5G standards, supported by an antenna system with Massive MIMO technology incorporating subarrays. A subarray microstrip antenna that has small element spacing will result in mutual coupling effects. This paper proposes design of a two rectangular subarray antenna with coaxial feeding for massive MIMO development and analysis the effect of mutual coupling at varying spacing element. Antennas are designed and simulated, namely a single antenna, a two element antenna arrayed in the E-plane and a two element antenna arrayed in the H-plane. The simulation results show that the mutual coupling of the two antenna elements arrayed in the E-plane for all element spacing is less than -20 dB, which means the mutual coupling effect can be ignored. Whereas the mutual coupling of the two antenna elements arrayed in the H-plane for all spacing elements is greater than -20 dB, which means the value of the mutual coupling must be considered. The bandwidth of the two element subarrays on E and H-plane is 77.3-88.5 MHz depending on the element spacing, which is still below 100 MHz required for 5G application.