New Design Approach for Mutual Coupling Reduction in Two-Port Compact Antenna Array for W-LAN MIMO Applications

A compact antenna array comprised of two half-split cylindrical dielectric resonator antennas (CDRAs) is presented to achieve low mutual coupling. These CDRA elements are formed by partitioning a cylindrical dielectric block into two identical semicircular segments and are separated by a vertical metallic plate with an air gap. A pair of L-shaped microstrip feed lines is used to excite the half-split CDRA elements. A defected ground structure (DGS) with engineered slots and a vertical metallic plate are used to reduce the mutual coupling between the array elements significantly. With an inter-element spacing of 0.036λ
0
, the mutual coupling decreased to -22.66 dB at 5.2 GHz, which represents an improvement of 14 dB over a reference array. Realized peak gain of the proposed antenna array is approximately 4.77 dBi estimated at 5.2 GHz.