Study of reconfigurable antennas for MIMO systems

This paper presents our initial study on a novel reconfigurable MIMO slot antenna to achieve pattern diversity and therefore improve the system performance. The MIMO antenna consists of two identical reconfigurable slot antennas which are separated by a distance of less than quarter wavelength designed at the frequency of 5.2 GHz suitable for WLAN applications. Each of the slots can be reconfigured in their length by switching on/off the shorting pins within it. The configurations of these shorting pins affects the mutual coupling between the array elements and this leads to pattern diversity which can be used to achieve the optimal capacity of the MIMO channel.