Mutual Coupling Reduction in UWB MIMO Array Antenna

Abstract

The combination of UWB technology with MIMO technique has uncovered new avenues of research in the 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 associated with the no. of antennas element so the higher the elements 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 b/w closely carefully 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 refuted 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, stepped slots and linear tapered slots. 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.