The work presents the design of a novel semi-circular arc-shaped two-element multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna with improved isolation. The antenna is obtained by cutting and subtracting a circular disk from another circular disk, forming the shape of a semi-circular arc. The antenna is replicated to form a two element MIMO antenna system on a FR4 substrate of size 36 Â 26 mm 2 with edge-to-edge separation of 12.4 mm. The developed MIMO antenna resonates in the frequency range 3.26 to 6.97 GHz giving a maximum element-to-element isolation around 26 dB in the operating bandwidth. Also, the antenna gives a maximum radiation efficiency of 98% with a peak gain of 5.3 dBi in the operating band. The proposed compact MMO antenna covers wide variety of wireless applications like 5G sub-6 GHz and wireless local area network (WLAN) applications, which includes n77/n78/n79, WiFi-5, V2X/DSRC, WiFi-6, and INSAT-C bands. Characteristic mode analysis (CMA) is performed in characterizing the performance of the antenna over the specified operating bands by studying and analyzing the parameters like modal significance (MS), characteristic angle (CA), modal current, and modal patterns. The obtained MIMO parameters like envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), mean effective gain (MEG), and total active reflection coefficient (TARC) reveal that the proposed antenna is a suitable choice in MIMO environment.