IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

16, 2017 529

A Dual-Band Multiport MIMO Slot Antenna

for WLAN Applications
Saber Soltani, Parisa Lotfi, and Ross D. Murch

Abstract—A novel compact dual-band multiple-input–multiple-

output (MIMO) antenna design for IEEE 802.11 applications is
proposed. The antenna operates at 4.9–5.725 GHz with four ports
and at 2.4–2.5 GHz with two ports and utilizes a dual-band dual-
port MIMO antenna to cover the 2.4/5-GHz bands alongside two
single-band antennas to cover the 5-GHz band. This allows simul-
taneous operation at both WLAN frequencies while having only
four ports in total. Isolation between ports is better than 12 dB
and is achieved with no reconfigurable elements. The overall an-
tenna size is compact, occupying 46 × 20 × 1.6 mm3 , and is
printed on an FR-4 printed circuit board. The proposed antenna is
investigated by simulation and measurement, and results include
radiation patterns, efficiency, S-parameters, signal correlations,
and branch power ratios between ports. These show that in typical
wireless environments, envelope cross correlations of less than 0.3
between the ports are obtained.
Index Terms—Multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO), multi-
port antenna, slot antenna.
I. INTRODUCTION
HE IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac wireless local Fig. 1. Schematic of the proposed dual-band multiport antenna.
T area network (WLAN) standards [1] incorporate multiple-
input–multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology. These frequency, ports, and size has been performed previously [2].
WLAN standards can support up to two antenna elements at Antenna designs include two ports at 2.4 GHz [3], more than
2.4–2.5-GHz (802.11 n) and up to four antenna elements and two ports at 2.4 GHz [4], two ports at 5 GHz [5], four ports
four data streams for each user or mobile station at 4.9– at 5 GHz [6], 2-port dual-band 2.4/5 GHz designs [7], 2-port
5.725 GHz. As a result, there is a need for a 2-port MIMO dual-band reconfigurable designs [8], 4-port dual-band anten-
antenna at 2.4 GHz and a 4-port MIMO antenna at 5 GHz op- nas [9], and finally 4-port reconfigurable designs [2]. However,
erating simultaneously. Many types of MIMO antennas have to our knowledge there are no published designs that provide a
been studied previously [2]–[9] to meet WLAN requirements. 2-port MIMO antenna at 2.4 GHz and a 4-port MIMO antenna
For small devices, such as smartphones and tablets, a unique at 5 GHz operating simultaneously without reconfiguration.
challenge in the MIMO antenna design is embedding the an- In this letter, we propose a new design that makes use of a
tenna inside the device while maintaining sufficiently low isola- previously proposed dual-band dual-port MIMO antenna oper-
tion or mutual coupling (mutual coupling is related to isolation ating in the 2.4/5-GHz WLAN [7] combined with two single-
through the impedance to S-parameter conversion formula and band antennas operating at 5-GHz WLAN [2]. In particular, the
depends on isolation as well as return loss. To avoid confu- design provides a 2-port antenna operating at 2.4–2.5 GHz si-
sion, the authors only use the term isolation here). To achieve multaneously with a 4-port antenna operating at 4.9–5.725 GHz,
good performance in MIMO systems, the antenna ports should with isolation better than 12 dB, size 46 × 20 × 1.6 mm3 with
be uncorrelated, and in most scenarios, this can be shown to no need for microelectromechanical system (MEMS) switches,
be equivalent to good isolation or sufficiently low isolation be- and bias circuitry. Unlike [2], which supports 2.4 and 5 GHz
tween radiators. A review of antennas for WLAN in terms of by active switching, this antenna is passive and is tuned to
work at both bands while maintaining the same efficiency and
Manuscript received March 8, 2016; accepted June 26, 2016. Date of pub- physical size. However, the tradeoff arising from not using
lication July 7, 2016; date of current version March 20, 2017. This work was reconfiguration is that, for the same size, isolation between an-
supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council under Grant 617113. tenna elements is reduced from around 18 to 12 dB.
P. Lotfi is with the Division of Biomedical Engineering, Hong Kong Univer-
sity of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong (e-mail: plp@ust.hk).
S. Soltani and R. Murch are with the Department of Electronic and Computer
II. DUAL-BAND MULTIPORT MIMO ANTENNA GEOMETRY
Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Fig. 1 illustrates the proposed 4-port antenna geometry. It
Hong Kong (e-mail: ssoltani@ust.hk; eermurch@ust.hk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
has an overall substrate area of 46 × 20 mm2 , and the antenna
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. is printed on a 1.6-mm-thick FR4-epoxy substrate with rel-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2016.2587732 ative permittivity of 4.4 and loss tangent to 0.002. The four

1536-1225 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
530
Fig. 2. Illustration of the dual-band 4-port antenna design approach.
Designs I–IV are denoted as D-I to D-IV.
Fig. 3. Current distribution for designs D-I and D-II.
fundamental antenna elements in this design are slots located at
the four corners of the substrate, and these are labeled as A1 –A4
in the figure. The antennas A2 , A4 are reflection symmetric to
antennas A1 , A3 with respect to the vertical center-line of the
structure. The dimensions of the antenna are found and opti-
mized using CST Microwave Studio (CST MWS) [38] [10] to
meet the required performance.
A. 2-Port Dual-Band Antenna Structure
Operation of the dual-band 2-port antenna can be explained
by referring to the simplified geometry D-I (Design-I) in Fig. 2.
It includes a series-feeding arrangement and a λ/4 monopole-
slot with length L1 , which controls the excitation of the
antenna’s lower band, operating at 2.4 GHz to cover the 2.4–
2.5-GHz band. In addition, there is a λ/2 slot with length of
L2 , which controls the excitation of the antenna’s upper band to
cover the 4.9–5.1-GHz, 5.15–5.35-GHz, and 5.47–5.725-GHz
WLAN bands. The novelty of the design is that the radiators can
be closely spaced at 0.5 mm, which is important for size reduc-
tion. The two slots are selected to have widths of (W1 , W2 ), and
these are useful for widening the bandwidths of the antenna’s
lower and upper bands. To excite the antennas, a stepped 50Ω
microstrip series feedline with widths of W3 and W4 printed at
location X1 away from the edge of the ground plane is used. The
lengths of the feedline are chosen to be L3 and L4 . The loca-
tion, width and lengths of the feedline have a large effect on the
impedance matching over the antenna’s lower and upper bands.
The 2-port MIMO antenna can be constructed by concatenating
it with antenna A2 , a reflected version of A1 . To improve iso-
lation between the two closely packed antennas, a back-to-back
slot arrangement is used. Further improvement in isolation is
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 16, 2017
Fig. 4. Simulated S-parameters (dB) results for (a) dual-band 2-port
designs D-I, II; (b) 4-port designs D-III, IV.
Fig. 5. Measured S-parameters results of the proposed MIMO antenna.
required, however, and it is necessary to add additional decou-
pling slits as shown in D-II in Fig. 2. From the current distribu-
tions for the geometries D-I and D-II in Fig. 3, it is observed that
the surface current is largely confined to the excitation point and
edges of the radiating slots, and this increases the coupling be-
tween the antennas. To realize more isolation, two pairs of λ/4
slits with total lengths of L5 and L6 + L7 at 2.45 and 5.5 GHz
with fixed widths and separations of 0.5 mm are used (see D-II).
As shown in Fig. 4(a), without decoupling slits (D-I), −8 dB
isolation with very poor impedance bandwidth at both WLAN
bands is obtained. By introducing the first pair of λ/4 slits at
2.45 GHz with D-II, L5 = 0 mm, not only is good impedance
matching at the lower band achieved, but 17 dB isolation is also
obtained. At the upper band, the performance of the MIMO an-
tenna remains poor. However, by adding the second pair of λ/4
slits (with respect to 5.5 GHz), S21 provided by the isolator in
D-II is better than 17 and 11 dB across the entire bandwidth of
the two bands, as shown in Fig. 4(a).
SOLTANI et al.: DUAL-BAND MULTIPORT MIMO SLOT ANTENNA FOR WLAN APPLICATIONS 531

Fig. 6. Measured radiation efficiency and peak gain results of the proposed
MIMO antenna.

B. 4-Port Single-Band Antenna Fig. 7. Measured radiation patterns results of the proposed MIMO.

To create a 4-port antenna operating at the 5-GHz WLAN TABLE I

band, two vertically polarized λ/4 slot (with respect to 5.5 GHz) REF. [2] AND PROPOSED ANTENNA PERFORMANCE COMPARISON
antennas with dimensions of (W8 × L8 ) are added to the design
to cover the 4.9–5.1-GHz, 5.15–5.35-GHz, and 5.47–5.725-GHz Center Frequency (GHz) 2.45 5.5
bands. This is shown in D-III in Fig. 2 where the electrical
Antenna Port Number Port 1, 2 Port 1, 2 Port 3, 4
length of the single-band antennas (A3 ) and their decoupling
slot is about one quarter-wavelength (≈ 0.29λg) at a frequency Ref.[2] BW(GHz), 2.4–2.48, 18 5–6, 18 5–6.1, 14.5
Max. |S i j |(dB)
of 5.5 GHz. A coaxial probe feed located at X3 away from the Effi.(%), Max. 41, 0.05 65, 2.44 71, 3.16
end of the slots is used for excitation. These antennas are located Gain(dBi)
at distance X4 from the edge of ground plane and distance X5 Prop. BW(GHz), 2.4–2.5, 12 4.9–5.8, 12 5–6.5, 12
Work Max. |S i j |(dB)
from the adjacent antenna. Due to the orthogonal orientation of
Effi.(%), Max. 60, 0.5 60, 2.5 85, 3.4
(A3 –A4 ) compared to (A1 –A2 ), good isolation (S31 and S32 ) is Gain(dBi)
achieved in the 5-GHz WLAN band, but still S34 is higher than
–10 dB. To enhance the isolation between A3 and A4 , a quarter-
wavelength rectangle decoupling element slot with dimensions TABLE II
of (W9 × L9 ) is added to the design as in D-IV [2]. Fig. 4 shows MEASURED ECC/MEG(db)/BPR RESULTS FOR PROPOSED ANTENNA
simulated S-parameter results at ports 3 and 4 for D-III, IV. In
D-IV, a 2-port antenna operating at 2.4–2.5 GHz together with Center Freq. (GHz) 2.45 5.5
a 4-port antenna operating at 4.9–5.725 GHz is formed.
Antenna port no. Port 1, 2 Port 1, 2 Port 3, 4
Outdoor Γ = 5 dB 0.001/–6.2/0.03 0.27/–6.4/0.09 0.11/–5.8/0.04
III. MEASUREMENT AND SIMULATION RESULTS Indoor Γ = 1 dB 0.014/–3.7/0.02 0.125/–3.8/0.08 0.02/–3.5/0.03

A prototype of the complete antenna design, as shown in

Fig. 5, was also constructed and tested. SMA connectors were
used to feed ports 1 and 2, and coaxial probe feeds were used
for ports 3 and 4.
Measured S-parameter results of the proposed MIMO an-
tenna with optimized dimensions are shown in Fig. 5. Due to
the symmetric design of the antenna, only results for A1 and A3
are provided. The 4-port reflection coefficient measurement of
the prototype antenna was performed using a vector network an-
alyzer (Rohde & Schwarz, ZV8). At 2.4 GHz, the 2-port MIMO
antennas operate in the lower WLAN band ranging from 2.4 to
2.5 GHz for S11 less than –10 dB. It is found that the isolation
between all antenna ports can be maintained better than 10 dB,
and in the worst case, isolation for the 4-port MIMO design
is 12 dB at 5.5 GHz. In general, good agreement is observed
between the measured results of the symmetric ports in Fig. 5
and the simulated results in Fig. 4. The far-field results includ-
ing radiation efficiency, peak gain, and radiation patterns for A1
and A3 are measured using a Satimo StarLab system 11. The
4-port antenna is placed in the xy-plane, with all ports not under
test matched with 50-Ω load terminations. It is observed that at
the lower band, we have 14 dB isolation and the total radiation
efficiency of A1 is 60% with 0.5 dBi peak gain at 2.45 GHz. The
measured isolation for A1 at 5.5 GHz is 12 dB, and we achieve
60% total efficiency with 2.4 dBi peak gain, as shown in Fig. 6.
For A3 at 5.5 GHz, total radiation efficiency is about 85% with
around 3.4 dBi peak gain. Fig. 7 shows the measured 2-D radia-
tion patterns for A1 and A3 in the xz- and yz-planes. From Fig. 7,
it can be observed that the antennas A1 and A2 are polarized in
±x-directions at 2.45/5.5 GHz and A3 and A4 are polarized in
the +y-direction at 5.5 GHz. At 5.5 GHz, A1 and A2 operate as
closed-end slots, and their radiation patterns are like small mag-
netic dipoles oriented in the x-axis (x-polarized) (A1 ) leading to
bidirectional broadside pattern in ±z. For the open-ended slots,
a semi endfire radiation pattern is observed. Therefore, good
pattern diversity and cross polarization are achieved.
A performance comparison of the proposed antenna in this
study and the antenna in [2] is listed in Table I where both anten-
nas have the same size. It should also be noted that in our design,
the gain imbalance between ports 1,2 and 3,4 at 5.5 GHz is about
532
Fig. 8. Measured channel capacity results of the proposed MIMO antenna
operating at 2.45 GHz with two ports and 5.5 GHz with four ports.
1 dB and is still within 3 dB. Further discussions on the effect of
this on diversity performance are provided in Section IV, where
the authors calculate mean effective gains (MEGs) that take into
account the entire antenna pattern. This table also helps high-
light the tradeoffs between our current work and [2] and [7].
Removing the reconfigurable structure used in [2] allows for a
simplified structure that does not require switches or via holes
and hence provides enhanced efficiency since switches are not
required. This simplification, however, comes at the cost of de-
creased performance in terms of isolation, which is reduced to
12 dB compared to 18 dB between A1 and A2 . This is because
our proposed dual-band antenna is much larger than the recon-
figurable one and therefore reduces the isolation between them.
This also highlights the difference between our current work
and [7], as [7] does not address the effects of the increased size
of its structure when attempting to extend it to four ports at
5 GHz. This tradeoff between isolation and reconfiguration is
an important consideration in the design of MIMO antennas.
IV. DIVERSITY AND MIMO PERFORMANCE
It is important to estimate the diversity performance and
MIMO channel capacity that can be obtained from the antenna
[12]. Results for complex cross correlation ρc using radiation
patterns, envelope correlation coefficients (ECCs) ρe ∼ |ρc |2 ,
MEG, the branch power ratio (BPR), and channel capacity [12]
at the 2.4- and 5-GHz bands for both antennas operating at
2.45 and 5.5 GHz are provided in Table II. Acceptable diversity
performance is said to be achieved when ρe < 0.5 [12]. In our
calculations, we set Γ, cross-polarization discrimination (XPD),
at 1 and 5 dB for modeling the indoor and outdoor fading en-
vironment, respectively, and the angular density functions are
assumed as Gaussian in elevation and uniform in azimuth [13].
The worst ECC result occurs at 5.5 GHz and is 0.27. ECC results
less than 0.3 demonstrate that the envelope correlation is suffi-
ciently low for good diversity performance. Good diversity per-
formance, however, also requires that the average signal power
received by all antennas is approximately equal. Using the same
mobile communication channel assumptions as defined previ-
ously, MEG and BPR are calculated as 12. Table II shows that the
proposed antenna satisfies the criterion of low correlation with
comparable average received power |M EGi − M EGj | < 3 dB
12 at these frequency bands. To obtain estimates of the channel
capacity, the authors performed an experimental measurement
of the MIMO channel capacity using our 4 × 4 MIMO an-
tenna test-bed 14. From Fig. 8, It is observed that the measured
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 16, 2017
capacities of the 2 × 2 channel at 2.45 GHz and 4 × 4 channel at
5.5 GHz are around 15 and 35 b/s/Hz at 30 dB for the non-line-
of-sight (NLOS) indoor environment. These results are close
to the ideal result the authors would expect, and therefore the
proposed design is potentially useful in MIMO communication
applications, such as in IEEE 802.11.
V. CONCLUSION
A compact multiport antenna for IEEE 802.11 MIMO ap-
plications is proposed. At the 2.4GHz WLAN band, it pro-
vides two ports operating at 2.4–2.5 GHz, with isolation bet-
ter than 14 dB. At the 5-GHz WLAN band, the antenna pro-
vides four ports operating from 4.9 to 5.75 GHz, with iso-
lation between antennas better than 12 dB. A prototype with
area 46 × 20 × 1.6 mm3 provides isolations among ports bet-
ter than 10 dB and greater than 50% efficiency. Diversity and
MIMO capacity results for a typical NLOS indoor propaga-
tion environment also demonstrate the potential usefulness of
the design for WLAN applications. Our results also highlight
that there is a tradeoff between reconfigurable and nonrecon-
figurable designs in that nonreconfigurable designs such as
the one proposed here have a simple geometry and good effi-
ciency, but typically at the expense of reduced isolation between
antennas.
REFERENCES
[1] E. Larsson, O. Edfors, F. Tufvesson, and T. Marzetta, “Massive MIMO
for next generation wireless systems,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 52,
no. 2, pp. 186–195, Feb. 2014.
[2] S. Soltani, P. Lotfi, and R. D. Murch, “A port and frequency reconfig-
urable MIMO slot antenna for WLAN applications,” IEEE Trans. Anten-
nas Propag., vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 1209–1217, Apr. 2016.
[3] C.Y. Chiu, C.H. Cheng, R. Murch, and C. Rowell, “Reduction of mutual
coupling between closely-packed antenna elements,” IEEE Trans. Anten-
nas Propag., vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 1732–1738, Jun. 2007.
[4] C.-Y. Chiu, J.-B. Yan, R. Murch, J. Yun, and R. Vaughan, “Design and
implementation of a compact 6-port antenna,” IEEE Antennas Wireless
Propag. Lett., vol. 8, pp. 767–770, 2009.
[5] J. OuYang, F. Yang, and Z. M. Wang, “Reducing mutual coupling of
closely spaced microstrip MIMO antennas WLAN application,” IEEE
Antennas Wireless Propag. Lett., vol. 10, pp. 310–313, 2011.
[6] M. S. Sharawi, “A 5-GHz 4/8-element MIMO antenna system for IEEE
802.11ac devices,” Microw. Opt. Technol. Lett., vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 1589–
1594, Jul. 2013.
[7] S. Soltani, P. Lotfi, and R. Murch, “Design of compact dual-band
dual-port WLAN MIMO antennas using slots,” in Proc. Antennas
Propag. USNC/URSI Nat. Radio Sci. Meet., IEEE Int. Symp., Jul. 2015,
pp. 924–925.
[8] J.-H. Lim, Z.-J. Jin, C.-W. Song, and T.y-Y. Yun, “Simultaneous fre-
quency and isolation reconfigurable MIMO PIFAs using PIN diodes,”
IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 5939–5946, Dec.
2012.
[9] Y.-C. Lu et al., “Design and system performances of a dual-band 4-port
MIMO antenna for LTE applications,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Antennas
Propag, Jul. 2011, pp. 2227–2230.
[10] CST Microwave Studio CST, ver. 2015.08.
[11] [Online]. Available: http://www.satimo.com/content/products/starlab
[12] R. Vaughan and J. Andersen, “Antenna diversity in mobile communi-
cations,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. VT-36, no. 4, pp. 149–172,
Nov. 1987.
[13] C. C. Chiau, “Study of the diversity antenna array for the MIMO wireless
communication systems,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Electronic
Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London, U. K., 2006.
[14] C. Y. Chiu, C. H. Cheng, Y. S. Wan, C. Rowell, and R. Murch, “Design
of a flat fading 4 × 4 MIMO testbed for antenna characterization using
a modular approach,” in Proc. IEEE Wireless Netw. Conf., Mar. 2007,
pp. 2913–2918.