Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna is at core of the presently available wireless technologies. The design of MIMO antennas over a limited space requires various approaches of mutual coupling reduction, otherwise gain, efficiency, diversity gain, and radiation patterns will be severely affected. Various techniques have been reported in literature to control this degrading factor and to improve the performance of the MIMO antennas. In this review paper, we have carried out an extensive thorough investigation of diversity and mutual coupling (correlation) reduction techniques in compact MIMO antennas.

As a recently proposed concept, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars exhibit much higher spatial resolution than traditional transmitter based radars because of the synthesized virtual array. In this paper, the problem of minimum redundancy (MR)-MIMO array synthesis is addressed, which seeks to maximize the virtual array aperture of MIMO radars for a given number of transmitting and receiving elements. A hybrid method combining autocorrelation property of cyclic difference sets (CDSs) and global search characteristics of ant colony optimization (ACO) is proposed for a rapid and numerically-effective exploration of MR-MIMO array configurations. Numerical experiments validate the proposed method, showing improvements in convergence rate and computational cost with respect to bare ACO-based search as well as improvements in the generality and configuration variety with respect to the CDS-based method.

In this paper, a novel design of compact wideband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna operating over a frequency range of 1.8–4.0 GHz at 10 dB is presented for mobile terminals. The MIMO antenna design consists of two symmetrical and orthogonal radiating elements with a small size of 15.5 × 16.5 mm2 printed on the corners of a mobile circuit board. The radiating element is composed of four meandered monopole branches with a strip-line fed by a probe. By triangularly trimming the corners of the common ground plane beneath the radiating elements, not only the mutual coupling is reduced, but also impedance bandwidth is increased. Although, the antenna in this form has sufficient correlation level between the radiating elements for MIMO operation, a novel design of plus-shaped parasitic element is inserted to the ground plane between those radiating elements in order to further enhance the isolation. The performance of the MIMO antenna is investigated in terms of s-parameters, radiation pattern, gain, envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), and total active reflection coefficient (TARC), and is verified through the measurements. The results demonstrate that the proposed MIMO antenna has good characteristics of wideband, isolation, gain, radiation pattern, and is compatible with LTE, WiMAX, and WLAN, besides it is small, compact, and embeddable in mobile terminals.

A compact navigation receiver comprising a decoupled and matched four-element L1-band antenna array with an inter-element separation of a quarter of the free-space wavelength is presented in this paper. We investigate the impact of the decoupling and matching network on the robustness of the navigation receiver. It is observed that in order to achieve high robustness with a compact antenna array, it is necessary to employ a decoupling and matching network, particularly in case of three spatially separated interferers. Furthermore, we study the influence of the polarization impurity of the compact planar antenna array on the equivalent carrier-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CINR) of the receiver when impinged with different numbers of diametrically polarized interference signals. It is shown that the higher-order modes possess strong polarization impurity, which may halve the available degrees-of-freedom for nulling in the presence of linear-polarized interferers, using a conventional null-steering algorithm. We verify the robustness of the designed compact receiver by means of a complete global-navigation-satellite-system demonstrator. It is shown that the maximum jammer power that is allowed us to maintain the CINR above 38 dBHz with three interferers can be improved by more than 10 dB if a decoupling and matching network is employed.

In this work, the design, fabrication, and testing of low sidelobe level (SLL) Butler matrix-based beamformers is presented. The paper is divided in two parts. The first part deals with the conventional technique of simultaneous excitation of input ports. The second part introduces some novel modified low SLL Butler matrices, as an alternative advantageous design choice. Circuit architecture makes use of asymmetric branch line couplers able to provide high values of output power division ratios. Radiation patterns with SLLs far lower than −23 dB are achieved, without the use of any additional circuitry, in opposition to the case of simultaneous port excitation. Apart from SLL reduction, the switched line-phase shifter technique is applied in order to increase the number of radiated beams and improve scanning coverage. The beamformers are suitable for interference suppressing point-to-multipoint ground communications, satellite and radar/EW/SIGINT systems. Several microstrip circuit prototypes are designed, fabricated, and tested, whereas extended simulation and measurements results are adduced.

This paper presents the design of an eight-element 60 GHz phased-array receiver chip with interference mitigation capability, fabricated in 0.25 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. Each receiver element contains a low noise amplifier (LNA) and a vector-modulator that supports high-resolution amplitude and phase control. A fully differential power combining network follows the eight elements. The chip also includes an active power divider, a down conversion mixer, and fully integrated 48 GHz PLL to demonstrate the IF down-conversion. With LNA, a phase shifter and hybrid active and passive power combining network, each receiver path achieves 18 dB of gain, 360° phase shift in steps less than 3°, 20 dB amplitude control, and 4 GHz 3 dB-bandwidth and input referred 1 dB compression point P1 dB of each element is of −22 dBm. Each receiver element dissipates in total 132 mW. The phased-array receiver shows more than 25 dB of signal to interference noise ratio, by means of amplitude and phase control.

This paper introduces a radar system for three-dimensional (3D) object detection and imaging. The presented 3D measurement method combines the frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) approach for range measurements with a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique for digital beamforming in two dimensions. With an orthogonal arrangement of the antenna arrays for transmit and receive, the angular information is obtained in azimuth and elevation without mechanical beamsteering. The proposed principle allows performing 3D imaging by means of the acquired range, azimuth, and elevation information with a minimum of required hardware. Starting from the realization of the 3D radar imaging concept, the hardware architecture and the developed prototype are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the object detection capability of the 3D imaging radar system is demonstrated by measurements. The results show that the introduced 3D measurement concept in its realization is well suited for numerous applications.

ADS-B provides convenient means of air traffic control (ATC) for its low cost and simple ground station hardware. In a low percentage of cases, aircraft positions transmitted via ADS-B are error prone due to e.g. faulty wiring with onboard navigation systems. In the proposed approach, direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is used to verify ADS-B airborne positions. The potential positioning error of ADS-B is thereby evaluated by comparing DOA estimates to DOA values calculated from ADS-B references and the sensor position and orientation. To prove the accuracy of the applied DOA estimation sensor, an additional measurement campaign using a dedicated measurement aircraft has been conducted.