A Decoupling Technique for Increasing the Port Isolation Between Two Strongly Coupled Antennas

A compact decoupling network for enhancing the port isolation between two closely spaced antennas is proposed in this paper. In the network, we first connect two transmission lines (TLs) individually to the input ports of two strongly coupled antennas. The length of the TLs is designed so that the trans-admittance between ports changes from a complex one at the antenna inputs to a pure imaginary one. A shunt reactive component is then attached in between the TL ends to cancel the resultant imaginary trans-admittance. Finally, a simple lumped-element circuit is added to each port for input impedance matching. The even-odd mode analysis is adopted to investigate the currents excited on the antennas for predicting the radiation pattern of the two-element antenna array. Two examples of printed antennas at 2.45 GHz are tackled by using the proposed decoupling structure. The measurement results agree quite well with the simulation ones. High antenna isolation and good input return loss are simultaneously achieved in both cases, which demonstrates the feasibility of the structure. The decoupled antenna array in each example radiates, as prediction, toward different but complementary directions when the input power is fed in turn to the two input ports. The array efficiency is estimated better than 75% in each example. This pattern diversity effect is helpful for reducing the channel correlation in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system.