Mutual Coupling Reduction in MIMO Microstrip Antenna by Designing a Novel EBG with a Genetic Algorithm

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antennas have been of interest in wireless communications in recent years. In these systems, many antennas are placed next to each other. The most important issue in the design of MIMO antennas is mutual coupling. Many methods have been proposed to reduce the mutual coupling of MIMO antennas. Many of these methods require an additional substrate on top or bottom of the antenna. In the reduction of mutual couplings electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structures are preferred because they are coplanar with the antenna and can be compactly designed. In this paper, to reduce mutual coupling in MIMO antennas, a novel compact EBG structure based on the genetic algorithm optimization is proposed. The method proposed in this paper to design an optimal EBG structure is to use a genetic algorithm (GA). In this method, an EBG unit cell is designed by a binary code, and then the 7×2 EBG structure of the unit cell is placed between two antenna elements with λ/2 distance. The optimization algorithm tries to find the best unit cell to reduce the mutual coupling between two elements. After 70 generations in the genetic algorithm, the GA determines a compact structure of EBG elements which reduces mutual coupling significantly. Two-element patch antennas with and without the proposed EBG structure are fabricated and the mutual couplings between array elements are measured at 5.68GHz in both cases. It is shown that the proposed compact EBG structure reduced the isolation of the two antennas by 27 dB. This decrease in mutual coupling is much higher than in the previous papers. The proposed EBG has little effect on other antenna radiation parameters such as S11 and radiation patterns. In general, in this paper, a compact and coplanar EBG structure is proposed to significantly reduce the mutual coupling in MIMO antennas. The method presented in this paper can be used for other MIMO antenna configurations at other frequencies and the proposed method will create a completely optimal structure to reduce mutual coupling.