MIMO Array Antenna for UWB Communications

Abstract

The combination of UWB technology with MIMO technique has uncovered new avenues of research in field of antenna design. The MIMO system comprises of multiple transmitting and receiving antennas which are closely spaced. The spatial multiplexing, to utilize multipath fading, is directly associated to the number of antenna elements so the higher the element counts the greater will be the throughput. This combination provides high data rate/throughput for modern day applications. High gain antennas are possible by designing arrays of MIMO systems. Major hurdle in this type of design is mutual coupling between closely spaced antennas which compromise the efficiency of antennas. This can be neutralized by increasing distance between elements but will compromise compactness of antenna systems. Large size antennas are not viable for modern day applications. This has to be countered by introducing various isolation techniques so that a compact antenna system can be designed which has high gain and greater bandwidth. Isolation improving techniques in this paper include defected ground, stubs and split ring resonators (SRR). The purpose of this paper is to open new avenues of research in the field of UWB MIMO Array antenna systems. The writing and sequence of paper is kept simple to act as a guideline for those who want to enter in field of antenna design. With the launch of the 3-10 GHz band, applications for Personal Area Networks (PAN) are major research areas in UWB systems.