A high isolation 4 by 4 MIMO antenna for LTE mobile phones using coupling elements

In this paper, we develop a simple but very effective 4 by 4 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna system for mobile phones consisting of different types of antennas to achieve low correlation property at the frequency ranges of 1710 to 2170 MHz, which covers wide LTE service bands, from band 1 to band 4. The proposed antenna system consists of two pair of antennas. Each pair consists of a planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) and a coupling antenna which has the property of the loop. The use of two different antenna types of IFA and a coupling achieves high isolation. Proposed antenna system occupies relatively small area and positions at the four corners of a printed circuit board. The gap between the two antennas is 4 mm, in order to realize the good isolation performance. To evaluate the performance of our proposed antenna system, we perform various experiments. The proposed antenna shows a wide operating bandwidth greater than 460 MHz with isolation between the feeding ports higher than 17.5-dB. It also shows that the proposed antenna has low Envelop Correlation Coefficient (ECC) values smaller than 0.08 over the all desired frequency tuning ranges.