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.

Multifunction radars based on active phased arrays are well known and widely studied systems. The concepts of bistatic architecture, conformal array and digital beam forming (DBF) are combined in this paper to define a novel multifunction radar for point defense. The conical shape of the antenna overcomes the significant limitations in the azimuth coverage of 360° of fixed-faces phased arrays due to the beam scanning up to 45°. The usage of separate transmit/receive arrays and the DBF technique adds the operational flexibility and the possibility of multiple simultaneous functions, with an optimal time-energy resources exploitation. After a short description of its technological demonstrator, some significant design trade-off, and operating aspects of the proposed architecture, called d-Radar, are described, showing the main differences with respect to the classical, four faces, and phased-array multifunction radar architecture. It is described how the operating modes can be made more and more similar to a “staring” or “ubiquitous” radar permitting an instantaneous detection and location of short-range, low-elevation targets for sea and ground operations. Finally, some remarks about the resources management and scheduling are shown with the results from a case of study.

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.

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.