Analysis and Optimization of Compact Suspended Plate MIMO Antennas

This paper presents the analysis and optimization of compact suspended plate antennas for multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless local area network (WLAN) applications. First, instead of using the conventional average envelope correlation coefficients, a performance metric using the two- and three-dimensional patterns of the envelope correlation coefficients are proposed to evaluate the diversity performance of antennas in MIMO systems. Following this, a compact three-element suspended plate antenna array with a bent ground plane is presented for WLAN MIMO applications. The diversity performance of the design is experimentally and numerically analyzed. Last, the design guidelines for the optimization of multiple suspended plate antennas in terms of their orientation and feed configuration is provided for achieving the upper bound of the diversity performance with minimum inter-element mutual coupling.