A Dual-Wideband Dual-Polarized Magneto-Electric Dipole Antenna With Dual Wide Beamwidths for 5G MIMO Microcell Applications

A dual polarized magneto-electric dipole antenna with dual wide beamwidths is proposed and investigated. Dual-layer U-shaped electric dipoles are cooperated with orthogonal <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\eta $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-shaped feeding line to obtain dual polarized and dual wideband features for 5G microcell applications. In addition, modified tetrahedral ground together with dual-layer three-element dipoles that are arranged as a triangle array is used to provide dual wide H-plane radiation characteristics. By doing so, a large coverage area and a reduced number of antennas can be achieved at the same time. In order to satisfy the stringent needs of high capacity and low mutual coupling, a three-dimensional (3D) MIMO system that consists of three proposed antenna elements is also designed. The antenna prototypes were fabricated and measured. Measured results show that an overlapped impedance bandwidth of 22.6% (VSWR < 2) with the stable gain of 6.9 ± 0.3 dBi were measured across the lower operating band. As for its corresponding upper operating band, it has exhibited overlapped impedance bandwidth of 19.6% (VSWR < 2) with the gain of 5.4 ± 0.7 dBi. The half-power beamwidths in the H-plane for both ports varies from 83° to 162°, and from 90° to 133°, respectively. Moreover, a low ECC of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times 10^{-4}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and the nearly identical MEG can be achieved by the MIMO system due to the 3D design. Hence, the proposed antenna is a desirable candidate for the future 5G microcell applications.