A Conformal Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna With Wide H-Plane and Band-Notch Radiation Characteristics for Sub-6-GHz 5G Base-Station

This contribution presents a novel 3-D circular conformal MIMO antenna system composed of three magneto-electric dipoles (MED) antennas. The single MED element was delicately designed to include one main (lower-band) dipole and two auxiliaries (upper-band) dipoles in order to achieve the dual-band radiation. The proposed MED owns a low-profile conformal geometry but features a wide H-plane beamwidth (minimum 103°). By embedding the metamaterial of the broadside-coupled E-shaped unit cells into the magnetic dipole, the height of MED can be dramatically reduced by 37.2% as compared with the conventional ones. Meanwhile, the two U-shaped notches together with a rectangular notch were included onto the E-dipole to create a band-notch, which offers the anti-interference capability to the ubiquitous 2.4-GHz signal of the wireless local area network. According to the measurement results, the MED element exhibits an impedance bandwidth of 54.2% (1.68–2.93 GHz) with a stable gain of 6.05± 1.15 dBi in the lower band and 9.2% (3.32–3.64 GHz) with 5.71 ± 0.7 dBi in the upper band, respectively. Moreover, the three-element MIMO system provides quasi-omnidirectional coverage in the H-plane from 1.68 to 3.64 GHz. The outstanding performance metrics validate the proposed ME dipole antenna that is well suited for the future sub-6-GHz fifth-generation MIMO mobile base stations.