Dielectric resonator-based four-element eight-port MIMO antenna with multi-directional pattern diversity

This work presents a four-element, eight-port cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (cDRA) with multi-directional pattern diversity for wireless access point applications. Initially, a dielectric resonator is fed by two different feeding techniques to create two simultaneous orthogonal patterns. This primary radiator is combined with similar radiators in a cross-configuration to obtain an eight-port multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system. The antenna elements are placed in such a way that each radiator of the proposed antenna can radiate in a different direction so that the field correlation between the antenna elements is minimum. The proposed diversity antenna consists of four antenna elements and eight polarised ports. Isolation between the ports is improved by generating orthogonal modes in each cDRA and exciting each cDRA to radiate in a different direction. The similarity in simulated and measured results confirm that the proposed eight-port diversity antenna is useful for the frequency ranges between 5.6 and 5.9GHz for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications.