A versatile semi-transparent quad-port multi and wide-band antenna for 4G/5G/WLAN/Wi-Fi 6E applications

• Published in: Optical and quantum electronics Vol. 55; no. 6
• Main Authors: Aliqab, Khaled, Armghan, Ammar, Alsharari, Meshari
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: 4G mobile communication; 5G mobile communication; Antennas; Channel capacity; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Computer Communication Networks; Electrical Engineering; Frequencies; Ground plane; Lasers; Local area networks; Microstrip antennas; MIMO communication; Optical Devices; Optics; Photonics; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Substrates; Wireless networks; 5G; MIMO; Flexible; Multi-band; Semi-transparent; Envelope correlation coefficient
• ISSN: 0306-8919; 1572-817X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11082-023-04820-x

In this article, a low-profile quad-port wideband and multiband printed conformal antenna for 4G/5G WLAN/Wi-Fi 6E applications is presented. The designed antenna is printed on a 0.5 mm thick transparent polymide substrate with dimensions of 112.8 × 112.8 mm 2 . Over a 10 dB impedance bandwidth, the slotted ground plane antenna can operate in the following spectrums: 2.2–2.6 GHz (Bluetooth, ISM band, Wi-Fi), 3–5.59 GHz (LTE band 42, New radio bands 77, 78, and 79), and 5.8–7.1 GHz (5G WLAN, Vehicular Band, Wi-Fi 6E band). Therefore, the antenna presented in this research has versatile operation, almost covering existing and upcoming frequency bands for 4G and 5G applications, respectively. The proposed conformal antenna also provides superior performance in terms of isolation—better than 20 dB—even after antenna elements are kept with a minimum distance between them. Because of such isolation improvements, it is possible to achieve a radiation efficiency of up to 93 percent with an overall gain of around 4.8 dBi over the desired operating band. Further, MIMO characteristics including channel capacity, Envelope Correlation Co-Efficient, Channel Capacity Loss and Diversity gain have been calculated to validate the MIMO performance of the proposed antenna. More studies have shown that the suggested antenna works well enough for both multi-band and wide-band applications.