A compact and dual-band microstrip MIMO antenna for LTE mobile terminals

In this paper, a compact and dual-band microstrip multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna for long term evolution (LTE) mobile terminals is proposed. The proposed MIMO antenna consists of two identical rectangular microstrip patch elements with coaxial feed and has a compact size of 50 mm × 65 mm × 1.6 mm. It covers the LTE bands 2570-2620 MHz and 3600-3800 MHz, with isolation of more than 20 dB and 16 dB, respectively. The rectangular slits are designed and etched into the edge of the microstrip patch in order to reduce the size. The microstrip patch has a small size of 16.7 mm × 24.8 mm, and a size reduction of almost 22% is achieved. The system capacity with the proposed MIMO antenna is verified through a link-level simulation and the diversity performance evaluated by envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), mean effective gain (MEG) is investigated as well. The proposed microstrip MIMO antenna is fabricated, and the simulated and measured results show a good agreement.