Four-Port Wide-Band Cavity-Backed Antenna With Isolating X-Shaped Block for Sub-6 GHz 5G Indoor Base Stations

Abstract

A four-port wideband cavity-backed antenna is presented for indoor base stations applications. The antenna is composed of a square open cavity with an X-shaped isolating block and 4 feeding monopoles symmetrically and orthogonally arranged in the aperture of the cavity. A novel methodology based on Characteristic Modes Analysis (CMA) is used for identifying the modes which are contributing to the coupling. As a result of this analysis, an X-shaped isolating block placed at the center of the cavity is proposed for increasing the isolation between ports. A wide-band four-port antenna with unidirectional radiation patterns is obtained with a measured impedance bandwidth ( $\text{S}_{11} < -10$ dB) ranging from 1.55 to 6 GHz (118%), covering most of the sub-6 GHz 5G bands. The proposed antenna provides four independent radiation patterns, with 16 dB of measured minimum isolation between ports and an efficiency higher than 84%. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) compatibility is confirmed with a $4\times 4$ MIMO simulated system with an envelope correlation coefficient (ECC)< 0.5 in different propagation conditions. The antenna is easy to fabricate and presents a compact size of $129.5\times 129.5 \times 28.2$ mm3 ( $0.68\lambda \times 0.68\lambda \times 0.15\lambda $ , at a frequency f $=\,\,\text{f}_{min} =1.55$ GHz). Moreover, the antenna has the advantage of avoiding complex feeding structures with baluns or directional couplers.

Keywords

• Cavity-backed antenna
• characteristic modes
• indoor base station
• MIMO
• 5G
• sub-6 GHz