IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

11, 2012

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Collocated Electric and Magnetic Dipoles With Extremely Low Correlation as a Reference Antenna for Polarization Diversity MIMO Applications
Jiang Xiong, Member, IEEE, Mingyu Zhao, Hui Li, Student Member, IEEE, Zhinong Ying, Senior Member, IEEE, and Bingzhong Wang, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractIn this letter, a magnetic dipole (M-dipole) and an electric dipole (E-dipole) are designed to form a collocated polarization-diversity-based dual-antenna system. The M-dipole is a modied shielded loop with multiple feed, and the E-dipole is a dipole. Measured results show that both radiators traditional have ideal impedance matching and port isolation and identical omnidirectional pattern with perfect orthogonal polarization at 860 MHz. The upper bound of the envelope correlation coefcient , with the measured antenna efciency taken into account, is only 0.018, and it is the lowest value when compared to some previous publications. Excellent effective diversity gain and channel capacity are also achieved at the operating frequency. The proposed dual-antenna system can mainly be used as a reference antenna for evaluating the performance of future collocated polarization-diversity-based multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) antennas. Index TermsCollocated antennas, magnetic dipole (M-dipole), multiple-inputmultiple-output (MIMO) systems, polarization diversity antennas.

Fig. 1. Schematic view of the proposed reference antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION ULTIPLE-INPUTMULTIPLE-OUTPUT (MIMO) technology is a critical component of the wireless communication system of the next generation. It can signicantly improve the channel capacity and overall performance of the system without additional spectrum and transmitted power [1]. Due to its compactness, collocated multiple antennas with polarization diversity have attracted considerable attention for terminal implementation. In recent years, a bunch of collocated radiating structures for MIMO applications have been
Manuscript received March 06, 2012; revised April 03, 2012; accepted April 10, 2012. Date of publication April 18, 2012; date of current version April 26, 2012. This work was supported in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant ZYGX2010J044 and the National Science Foundation of China under Grants 61101039 and 61107018. J. Xiong and B. Wang are with the Computational Electromagnetics Laboratory, Institute of Applied Physics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu 610054, China (e-mail: xiongjiang@uestc. edu.cn). M. Zhao is with State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: mingyu.zhaom@gmail.com). H. Li is with the Division of Electromagnetic Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering, Royal Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden (e-mail: Lihui@kth.edu.se). Z. Ying is with Sony-Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, 221 83 Lund, Sweden (e-mail: Ying.Zhinong@sonyericsson.com). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LAWP.2012.2195150

proposed [2][4]. However, in most practical applications, polarization diversity and angle diversity always coexist, and there is a lack of a universal standard for evaluating MIMO performance improvement such as element correlation and channel capacity brought by the polarization diversity alone. The motivation of this work is to design two simple collocated radiating elements [e.g., a pair of collocated electric dipole (E-dipole) and magnetic dipole (M-dipole)] with identical radiation pattern but completely orthogonal polarization, as a reference antenna, and thus its correlation and MIMO performance can then be taken as a fundamental limit that future practical collocated polarization diversity antennas (probably of various antenna types) can approach. The value of building such collocated dipoles for measuring polarization characteristics of a polarization diversity system has also been discussed in [5]. In principle, as shown in Fig. 1, a pair of an omnidirectional E-dipole and loop can form such a reference antenna if the E-dipole is placed along the central axis of the loop, as an omnidirectional loop is equivalent to an M-dipole [6], and the loop and the E-dipole are highly comparable but with orthogonal polarization. However, it is difcult to simultaneously achieve an omnidirectional donut-like radiation pattern, and good radiation efciency and gain, with either a simple electrically small or electrically large loop [6]. An efcient multiply-fed loop antenna with a moderate electrical size and an omnidirectional pattransformer tern has been proposed in [7], yet it utilized a in the feeding, which will signicantly affect the element isolation if it is collocated with an E-dipole. In this letter, the loop in [7] is modied so as to be directly connected with a 50- coaxial line, and it can maintain the typical omnidirectional radiation pattern of an M-dipole. A convenE-dipole is then added very close (only ) to the tional central axis of such a modied loop. These two radiators form

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

Fig. 3. Fabricated prototype of the reference antenna.

Fig. 2. Geometry of the proposed reference antenna. (a) Top view. (b) Side cutview. (Note that for simplicity, the side view of the E-dipole on the plane is shown together with the M-dipole.) Detailed dimensions are as follows: mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm, .

Fig. 4. Simulated and measured -parameters and the envelope correlation coefcient of the reference antenna.

the desired reference antenna. The measured results show that both radiators operate at 860 MHz, and very ideal port isolation (better than 40 dB) is achieved within the entire band. Pretty good MIMO performance like the diversity gain and channel capacity is also achieved at the operating frequency. II. ANTENNA STRUCTURE DESCRIPTION The geometry and parameters of the proposed reference antenna are shown in Fig. 2. The antenna system consists of a shielded, multiply-fed loop and a conventional E-dipole. Based on its shape, the loop is also described as a cart wheel or windmill-shaped antenna [8]. The radiating source of the multiply-fed loop is a circular loop in the horizontal ( ) plane, wound by a square hollow copper tube [see Fig. 2(b)]. This circular loop is broken into four equal sections by four feed gaps and is connected with four radial arms (composed of the same square hollow copper tubes). Each section is fed by a bent feed line. The feed line starts from a common point at the center, extends along one radial arm, turns and follows the circumference of the loop, bridges the feeding gap, and nally capacitively excites the neighboring loop section [see Fig. 2(a)]. Supported by 12 thin Plexiglas dummy slides at the feeding gaps and near the center of the loop, all feed lines are xed at the center of the square hollow tube. With elaborately chosen parameters, particularly the radius of the loop , the size of the square tube , and the rotation angle of the feed line , the input impedance of this loop is well tuned so that it can be directly connected with a 50- SMA connector, whose pin and ange are soldered with the common point of four feed lines and four radial arms, respectively [see Fig. 2(b)]. As a loop of this kind can be considered to have a natural balun [9], it can be

directly fed by a coaxial line without additional structures (e.g., ferrite rings). Compared to the loop proposed in [7], the transformer along -direction, which will otherwise introduce extra mutual coupling between the collocated E- and M-dipoles, must be removed, and the necessity of this will be discussed at the end of Section III. The other radiating element is a conventional E-dipole, with a bazooka balun to keep its good radiation pattern [6]. The E-dipole is placed in -direction, and thus the E-dipole and the loop (M-dipole) are expected to have identical patterns and completely orthogonally polarized far-elds. The mutual distance of such E- and M-dipoles is only , so it can be basically regarded to be collocated. III. ANTENNA PERFORMANCE AND DISCUSSIONS The full-wave simulation and optimization of the proposed reference antenna are carried out with the nite-integration-technique-based commercial software CST Microwave Studio [10]. A prototype (with the loop silver-plated) was fabricated and then measured with Agilent N5230A network analyzer. The photograph of the antenna prototype is shown in Fig. 3, and the simulated and measured -parameters are plotted in Fig. 4 for comparison. In Fig. 4, port 1 and port 2 represent the feedings for the loop and the E-dipole [see Fig. 2(b)], respectively. The red and blue lines represent the M- and E-dipoles, and the dashed and solid lines represent the simulated and measured results. Due to the fabrication tolerance of the loop, one sees in Fig. 4 that its operating frequency is slightly brought down, i.e., from the simulated 900 MHz ( , sim) to 860 MHz ( , meas). Then, the length of the collocated E-dipole is accordingly tuned so that the E-dipole

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Fig. 6. Measured upper bound of the envelope correlation coefcient ( EDG, and channel capacity of the reference antenna. TABLE I A COMPARISON OF THE MEASURED UPPER BOUND OF THE ENVELOPE CORRELATION COEFFICIENT OF THE PROPOSED REFERENCE ANTENNA AND THAT IN [2] AND [3]

),

Fig. 5. Simulated 3-D radiation pattern of the (a) loop and (b) E-dipole, and -plane and (d) -plane measured normalized electric eld patterns on (c) for the at the operating frequency. The cross-polarization components are for the E-dipole. loop and

and the fabricated loop can operate at the identical frequency. The measured and exhibit excellent port isolation (almost below 40 dB) within a broadband. They are relatively higher than the simulated results (below 60 dB), and this is due to the unavoidable interference brought by the practical SMA connector and the cable line. The full-wave simulated 3-D pattern of the loop and the E-dipole, and the measured copolarization and cross-polarization electric eld patterns of both antennas, normalized with respect to their respective maximum value, are plotted in Fig. 5. One sees, from the copolarization pattern, that both antennas have the typical gure-eight elevation plane and omnidirectional azimuth plane pattern variations, and the patterns of these two antennas are almost identical at the same operating frequency. On the other hand, the ratio of copolarization gain to cross-polarization gain of each antenna in both principle planes is above 20 dB, with a maximum value of 21.4 dB for the loop and 21.7 dB for the E-dipole. This indicates both antennas have good polarization purity, which is important in terms of accurately measuring cross-polar ratio (XPR) of a radio environment [5]. This has demonstrated perfect orthogonal polarization of the two basic dipoles as desired and also guarantees the excellent element correlation. Measured efciencies and gains are 82.1% (somewhat affected during the practical fabrication process) and 1.15 dBi for the loop, and 92.2% and 1.84 dBi for the E-dipole at 860 MHz. The envelope correlation coefcient across the band, calculated with the measured -parameters but antenna efciency not included is also shown in Fig. 4. The following equation is used for the calculation [11]: (1) It is far below 0.5, which is usually taken as a criterion of good isolation [12]. As the antenna radiation efciency is so signif-

icant for calculating the received signal correlation and evaluating the MIMO performance of the antenna system [13], we particularly measured the efciency of the loop ( ) and the E-dipole ( ) at several discrete frequencies around their operating frequency. Note here only an upper bond of the magnitude of the envelope correlation coefcient (corresponding to the worst case) can be evaluated due to the uncertainty of the unknown correlation of the losses [13]. The is calculated with the following equation:

(2) Fig. 6 plots the and another two important gures-ofmerit, i.e., the effective diversity gain (EDG) and the channel capacity, of the proposed reference antenna. During the calculation, a uniform 3-D angular power spectrum (APS) is assumed. The EDG is calculated in the same manner that [14] adopted, and the channel capacity is calculated under the equal power (EP) condition for dB. One sees that an EDG of 9.14 dB and a capacity of 11.05 bps/Hz have been achieved at the operating frequency, which is very close to the maximum achievable performance realized by the i.i.d. channel (i.e., an EDG of 10 dB and a capacity of 11.29 bps/Hz). It is also worth noting that the loss-included only gives upper bounds of the correlation coefcients, corresponding to the worst MIMO performance. Therefore, practical EDG and capacity are expected to be even better, especially at frequencies apart from the operating frequency. In addition, we compare in Table I the of our proposed antenna to another two previously reported collocated polarization diversity antennas (i.e., the best of [2] and the of [3]), both having excellent performance. For the ease of

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rent disturbs the original half-wavelength current distribution on the dipole, and thus the radiation pattern of the dipole is totally altered. In contrast, as the current (the radiating source) on the circular loop is in the plane (the -plane) perpendicular to the dipole, the loop is not affected much by the collocated dipole and can somehow keep its pattern [see Fig. 7(a)]. Therefore, the loop with the transformer and the E-dipole can no longer used as the desired reference antenna, as they have different radiation patterns.
Fig. 7. Simulated 3-D radiation pattern of the collocated (a) loop with a transformer and (b) the dipole. The induced electric current on the wire of the dipole is shown in the inset.

IV. CONCLUSION A collocated two-element antenna system based on polarization diversity is designed and analyzed. It consists of a modied multiply-fed shielded loop antenna and a E-dipole. Perfect orthogonal polarization leads to very high isolation, extremely low envelope correlation coefcient, and high EDG and channel capacity when the E- and M-dipoles are almost collocated and of identical radiation patterns. Such an antenna system is expected to be a reference antenna for future collocated polarization-diversity-based MIMO antennas. REFERENCES
[1] J. W. Wallace, M. A. Jensen, A. L. Swindlehurst, and B. D. Jeffs, Experimental characterization of the MIMO wireless channel: Data acquisition and analysis, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 335343, Mar. 2003. [2] C. Y. Chiu, J. B. Yan, and R. D. Murch, Compact three-port orthogonally polarised MIMO antennas, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 6, pp. 619622, 2007. [3] H. Li, J. Xiong, Z. Ying, and S. He, Compact and low prole co-located MIMO antenna structure with polarization diversity and high port isolation, Electron. Lett., vol. 46, pp. 108110, 2010. [4] A. S. Konanur, K. Gosalia, S. H. Krishnamurthy, B. Hughes, and G. Lazzi, Increasing wireless channel capacity through MIMO systems employing co-located antennas, IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech., vol. 53, no. 6, pp. 18371844, Jun. 2005. [5] T. W. C. Brown, S. R. Saunders, S. Stavrou, and M. Fiacco, Characterization of polarization diversity at the mobile, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 24402447, Sep. 2007. [6] C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2005, pp. 231255. [7] J. S. McLean, Multiply-fed loop antenna, U.S. 6515632, Feb. 4, 2003. [8] D. S. Kim, C. H. Ahn, Y. T. Im, S. J. Lee, K. C. Lee, and W. S. Park, A windmill-shaped loop antenna for polarization diversity, in Proc. IEEE Antennas Propag. Int. Symp., Jun. 2007, pp. 361364. [9] J. D. Kraus and R. J. Marhefka, Antennas: For All Applications, 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. [10] CST MWS. ver. 2009, Computer Simulation Technology, Darmstadt, Germany [Online]. Available: http://www.cst.com [11] S. Blanch, J. Romeu, and I. Corbella, Exact representation of antenna system diversity performance from input parameter description, Electron. Lett., vol. 39, pp. 705707, May 2003. [12] R. G. Vaughan and J. B. Andersen, Antenna diversity in mobile communications, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. VT-36, no. 4, pp. 149172, Nov. 1987. [13] P. Hallbjrner, The signicance of radiation efciencies when using S-parameters to calculate the received signal correlation from two antennas, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 4, pp. 9799, 2005. [14] M. Sonkki, E. Antonino-Daviu, M. Ferrando-Bataller, and E. T. Salonen, Planar wideband polarization diversity antenna for mobile terminals, IEEE Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 10, pp. 939942, 2011.

comparison, we made some necessary mathematical treatment to the original data in [2] and [3], and we can then make a fair comparison on their envelope correlation coefcient. One sees that the of the proposed dual-antenna system is even much lower than that reported in these two references. With above excellent performance ( , EDG, and channel capacity), such a collocated dual-antenna system with identical pattern and pure polarization diversity can therefore, as expected, be taken as a reference for evaluating the MIMO performance of future collocated polarization-diversity-based antennas. This reference antenna can also be exibly designed to operate at other desired frequencies if a scaling of several geometry parameters is conducted. Particularly, at some higher operating frequencies, one can either keep the size of the square tube ( ) but scale down and ne-tune other parameters for the ease of a conventional SMA connector implementation, or directly use a thin rigid coaxial line to feed the loop instead. Lastly, we add an additional remark on the necessity of our structure modication on the loop antenna in [7], particularly the removal of the transformer in a parallel direction with the E-dipole. The simulated transmission coefcients, when the loop in [7] with a transformer is directly applied, are plotted in Fig. 4 (see the dashed-dotted lines). One sees that, compared to our modied loop without the transformer, the and have signicantly increased around the operating frequency. A 28.4-dB deterioration of the (highlighted with a double-headed arrow) is observed at 900 MHz, and the measured ones of the fabricated antenna are expected to be even worse (see the difference represented by the solid and dashed lines in Fig. 4). Another serious problem caused by the transformer is the deformed pattern of the E-dipole at its operating frequency. Fig. 7(a) and (b) shows the simulated 3-D radiation pattern of the collocated loop with a transformer and the dipole, respectively. Compared to Fig. 5(a) and (b), one sees that as the transformer of the loop is in parallel with and extremely close to the wire of the dipole when they are in such a collocated position, the transformer can easily cause signicant induced current on the radiating wire of the dipole. Such induced cur-