Design of Uniplanar Compact Electromagnetic Band Gap (UC-EBG) for Massive MIMO 5G C-Band Antenna

Abstract This study aims to reduce the mutual coupling and envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) parameters of massive MIMO antennas. This parameter is important to support the performance of MIMO antennas in increasing high-speed data transmission. The observations in this study were carried out at a frequency of 3.5 GHz as one of the 5G frequency bands by using a comparative study method between the performance of the addition of Uni-planar Compact EBG (UC-EBG) and without using UC-EBG. The study used a massive MIMO 64 element antenna design with the addition of a specially designed UC-EBG surrounding the antenna element. The parameters of simulation and measurement results are compared with conventional MIMO antenna performance (without UC-EBG). Simulation results and antenna measurements show that the addition of the UC-EBG structure has succeeded in reducing the mutual coupling by 1.23 dB and improve the ECC parameter by 0.61. In addition, the UC-EBG structure can improve the performance of return loss and massive MIMO antenna VSWR. These results indicate that the addition of a special UC-EBG design around the MIMO patch antenna proposed in this study has an important contribution in increasing the isolation of massive MIMO antennas and can be the basis for the development of massive MIMO microstrip antennas.