A Study of Antenna Elements Configuration and User's Hand Effects on a Four-Element Dual-Band Sub-6 GHZ Mimo Antenna

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of different configurations of MIMO antenna operating in the 5G band with the effect of user's hand in data mode and suggests an optimized configuration to mitigate hand effects. A dual-band four-element MIMO antenna is used. All antenna elements (AEs) are identical planar inverted-F antenna (PIFAs) with a lower frequency band (LB) from 3.3 to 3.8 GHz and an upper frequency band (UB) from 5.2 to 6 GHz. In addition, four different configurations to place the AEs on the chassis are selected including worst and optimized configurations as well two intermediate cases. Results show that similar values of ECC are produced for both cases without and with user hand. These values are less than 0.20 on most frequency range, except the worst case configuration which has some high ECC values close to unity. Unlike ECC, TE is severely affected by user's hand as well as by the different configuration. TE of each AE under hand effect is degraded differently according to the thickness of hand tissue that covers it. TE in the optimized configuration without user's hand ranges between 50 and 95% in both frequency bands. However, this range deteriorates when user's hand effect is considered, between 40% and 15% in LB, and from 35% to 41% in the UB. Multiplexing efficiency analysis reveals that MIMO performance is mainly determined by TE, and the impact of the low ECC is insignificant. This indicates that improving the performance depends on improving the TE of AEs and optimizing their positions on the chassis to reduce interaction with user's hand. Moreover, the loss in ergodic capacity due to user's hand compared with free space is increased from 5 to 40% in the LB, and it is more stable in the UB and ranging between 12 and 17%.