A 3D Antenna Array based Solar Cell Integration for Modern MIMO Systems

Abstract

In this work, a design of a 3D array antenna based solar panel integration for self-powered applications in modern wireless communication network. Such array configuration is proposed for Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) applications. The proposed antenna array is structured as a cubical geometry integrated to a solar panel. Such integration is employed to achieve a selfpowered node. The proposed antenna is designed to perform an excellent size reduction at sub-6GHz frequency bands when designed with the aid of the metamaterial (MTM) structures. The antenna performance is enhanced by Moore fractal geometry based on electromagnetic band gap (EBG) defects in the ground plane. The proposed antenna is found to provide a moderate gain at 3.6GHz, 3.9GHz, and 4.9GHz. The antenna array shows low coupling effects, below -20dB, due the array configuration in a cubical shape arrangement. The proposed work is extended to evaluate effectively the bit error rate (BER) and channel capacity (CC), when the proposed antenna system is located in real world communication environments. Therefore, QPSK modulation scheme is considered to suite the applications of 5G systems. The amount of the harvested solar energy is considered the limit to manage the total signal to noise ratio (SNR) in that is applied to the proposed communication scheme. This work is considered for practical aspect issues that is related with amount for the generated power from such integration with solar panel and the total generated SNR. Finally, the comparison between measured and simulated data reveals an excellent agreement between them.