《A Compact Eighteen-Port Antenna Cube for MIMO Systems》.pdf

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012 445 A Compact Eighteen-Port Antenna Cube for MIMO Systems Jianfeng Zheng, Xu Gao, Zhijun Zhang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Zhenghe Feng, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—An 18-port compact antenna cube is proposed in this within a constrained volume. In [1]–[3], MIMO cube accommo- paper. The cube, which has a volume of 0.76 0.76 0.76 , dates up to 12 electrical dipole antennas on all its 12 edges. The provides 18 individual channels and is ideal for multiple-input 24-port and 36-port antenna cubes suitable for MIMO wireless multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications. On each of the total six faces of the cube, a three-port tri-polarization antenna communications are presented in [4]. is installed. All antennas adopt a metal backing configuration, However, existing cubes [1]–[4] demand a completely ded- so the ground of all antennas forms a well shield Faraday cage, icated space for antennas. As the antenna elements in those in which other functional circuits can be installed. Experimental cubes are omni-directional, the inner space must be kept empty measurements were carried out to evaluate the performance of to avoid performance degradation, i.e., other circuits cannot the antenna cube in different MIMO scenarios. The results show that MIMO systems with the proposed compact antenna cube be installed in the space. To resolve the problem, a compact outperform those with dipole antennas which occupy the same 18-port planar tri-polarization antenna cube for MIMO systems number of RF channels but with much larger space. When