Novel ultra-wideband antenna for diversity applications

It is a well-known fact that wireless communications systems suffer from channel fading caused by multipath environment. However, the performance of a wireless link can be significantly improved using spatial, polarization or pattern diversity techniques. Nowadays the trend for mobile terminals is to increase the number of operating frequency bands, in order to cover different applications. Therefore, a wideband diversity antenna seems to be an attractive solution to include in a multi-standard device. In recent years, some diversity antennas with large operating bandwidth have been proposed for different applications. In this paper, a compact diversity antenna with a bandwidth increase is presented. The antenna consists of a dual-port ultra-wideband annular ring slot antenna which can be used in multi-standard applications. CST Microwave Studio™ software is employed to analyze and design the antenna. The geometry of the antenna and its performance will be presented next. The diversity performance in a multipath propagation channel will be also investigated in terms of envelope correlation coefficient using measurements.