IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.
12, 2013
A Four-Antenna System With High Isolation for
Mobile Phones
Jingli Guo, Jiachang Fan, Ling Sun, and Baohua Sun
Abstract—In this letter, a four-antenna system with high isola-
tion for mobile phones is presented. The antenna system, which
consists of one main antenna and three auxiliary antennas, is lo-
cated on the phone circuit board with a size of 135 65 0.8 mm .
The main antenna located on the top of the circuit is used to send
and receive signals, which adopts improved monopole antenna,
to cover LTE700/2300/2500, GSM850/900/1800/1900/UMTS, and
2.4-GHz WLAN bands efficiently. Three auxiliary antennas
with the same size of 40 6 0.8 mm are respectively located
along the two vertical sides and the bottom of the circuit board.
As receiving antennas, these auxiliary antennas work in the
1880–2690-MHz band. By suitable arrangement and design, the
isolation between antennas of higher than 15 dB can be obtained,
and the efficiency of the antenna system in the working frequency
band reaches 40% or above, which can meet the requirements of
antenna performance in mobile communication area.
Index Terms—Coupling feed, four-antenna system, high-isola-
tion antenna.
I. INTRODUCTION
A S ONE of the key technologies of the fourth-genera-
tion mobile communications, the multiple-input–mul-
tiple-output (MIMO) system has attracted more and more
attention, as it can obtain high capacity and high transmission
speed under the background of limited frequency resources.
This new technology raises new requirements for the per-
formance of the mobile terminal antennas. In addition to the
requirement of compact size and multiband for single terminal
antenna, appropriate locations and high isolation of the multiple
antennas in a limited space are the focus of this letter.
In recent literature, the designed multiantenna mobile termi-
nals are mainly operating at 2.4/5.15-GHz Wireless Local Area
Network (WLAN) band [1]–[3]. In [4], the operating frequency
of the antenna is below 2 GHz, but the antenna occupies a rela-
tively large space, thus its practical application is limited. In [5],
two symmetrical monopole antennas are placed on the top of the
board, which works at UMTS/2.4-GHz WLAN bands. Unlike
two-antenna systems mentioned above, discussion of three or
more antennas in one terminal is still insufficient. In [6], three
folded monopole antennas covering WiBro/WLAN/M-WiMAX
Manuscript received April 09, 2013; revised May 17, 2013 and June 20, 2013;
accepted July 10, 2013. Date of publication July 31, 2013; date of current ver-
sion August 16, 2013. This work was supported by the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant K5051202008. (Cor-
responding author: J. Fan)
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Antennas and
Microwave Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail:
guojl@xidian.edu.cn; fan.jc2008@163.com; l_sun@stu.xidian.edu.cn;
bhsun@mail.xidian.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2013.2273551
1536-1225 © 2013 IEEE
979
are proposed, and the isolation between the antennas is higher
than 20 dB at higher frequency band (2.3–2.69 GHz). In [7], the
authors used four antenna elements to cover the UMTS band,
and the isolation between four antennas is higher than 11.5 dB.
Until now, four antennas in one terminal working on the band of
GSM900, as well as the lower frequency bands such as LTE700
(704–787 MHz), are rarely involved. As we all know, the lower
the operating frequency is, the larger the antenna will be. This
will bring great challenges for the engineers to finish the four-
antenna design in such a limited space as mobile phones.
In this letter, a four-antenna system with high isolation for
mobile phones is proposed. The system consists of a main
antenna and three auxiliary antennas. The main antenna located
at the top of main board can be used as receiving antenna
or transmitting antenna, covering the LTE700/2300/2500
(698–787/2300–2400/2500–2690 MHz), GSM850/900/1800/
1900/UMTS (824–894/880–960/1710–1880/1850–1990/
1920–2170 MHz), and 2.4-GHz WLAN (2400–2484 MHz)
bands. The three auxiliary antennas with the same size of
40 6 0.8 mm can cover the 1880–2690-MHz band. The
measured results show that the isolation between any of the
antenna is greater than 15 dB, and the efficiency of the antennas
in the working frequency band reaches 40% or above.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN
The system circuit board of the mobile phone discussed in this
letter is of size 135 65 mm due to the fact that the screens of
mobile phones now are usually 4.5 or 5 in. The FR4 substrate
of the mainboard has a thickness of 0.8 mm.
As shown in Fig. 1(a), the main antenna is constructed as an
improved monopole antenna. It is printed on a small no-ground
board space of 65 9.5 mm , and its thickness is only 4 mm.
The antenna comprises a feeding strip and two parasitic strips
to produce different current path. By bending the two parasitic
strips, the overall size of the antenna is greatly reduced. In ad-
dition, coupled feeding and shorted strip are adopted to achieve
distributed matching circuit [8], [9]. Point A in Fig. 1 is
the feed point, and point B is the shorting point. Ultimately, the
main antenna can cover 704–960- and 1710–2690-MHz bands.
Other detailed dimensions of the antenna are shown in Fig. 1(b).
The current distributions of the antenna at different frequencies
are shown in Fig. 1(c). It can be seen that at the first resonance
of low band, the current mainly focuses on the shorting strip.
At the second resonance, the current distributes mostly on the
feeding part and shorting strip. At the resonance of high fre-
quency band, the currents on the feeding part, shorting line, and
parasitic strip play relatively even roles.
During design of the multiple antennas for the MIMO
system, the isolation between antennas is of great importance.
980 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013

Fig. 2. (a) General view of the proposed mobile antenna. (b) Structure of the
phone circuit board (back view).

Fig. 3. (a) Geometry of the auxiliary antenna. (b) Dimensions of the auxiliary
antenna.

Fig. 1. (a) Geometry of the main antenna. (b) Dimensions of the main antenna.
(c) Current distribution on the main antenna at different frequency.

The strong mutual coupling will cause not only the impedance
of antenna mismatch, but also the relevance of signal in-
creasing. In order to meet the lower correlation coefficient of
the MIMO system requirements, the isolation between antenna
elements needs to be improved as much as possible. There
are some techniques such as adding a connecting line [10],
additional structure [11], and matching network [12] to improve
the isolation between antennas. So far, these methods are only
useful in a relatively narrow frequency band. Besides that, the
additional structure will lead to the limited space of terminals
being more crowded and make the design of the four-antenna Fig. 4. Variation of the return loss of the auxiliary antenna (Antenna 4) with
system more difficult. In this letter, we try to utilize more direct the increase of parameter .
ways including appropriate arrangement and antenna type to
improve the isolation.
The overall structure of the four-antenna system is shown in patches. Point A is the feeding point. Point C and D are two
Fig. 2(a). The main antenna (Antenna 1) is located at the top metallic vias to join the metal patches of the two sides together.
of the mobile phone circuit board, and three auxiliary antennas Moreover, the antenna has a shorted strip with its one terminal
(Antenna 2, Antenna 3, Antenna 4) are arranged at the two sides at the edge of the bigger radiated patch, and the other terminals
and the bottom of the board, respectively. The auxiliary an- at point B of the circuit board.
tennas are placed perpendicularly to the phone main board as The length of feeding line ( ) has a great effect on the perfor-
shown in Fig. 2, which is beneficial to improve the isolation be- mance of the auxiliary antenna. Fig. 4 shows the variation of the
cause the primary current on the auxiliary antennas and main return loss of the auxiliary antenna with the increase of the pa-
antenna are orthogonal. Another advantage of this arrangement rameter . The three auxiliary antennas are in the same structure,
is to save the occupied no-ground space of the antenna. The po- so Antenna 4 is selected here to observe the impact of param-
sitions of the auxiliary antennas along the two sides are deter- eter . It can be seen that with the decrease of the feeding-line
mined by a guideline of enough distance between four antennas. length, the size of no-ground space is reduced, which will lead
The three auxiliary antennas used in the letter are the same to the mismatch of the auxiliary antenna in its upper band, and
type as shown in Fig. 3. It is printed on FR4 substrate ( the bandwidth is narrowed. Because the antenna size should be
, thickness 0.8 mm) and comprises four rectangular metal as small as possible, and the return loss of the antenna should be
GUO et al.: FOUR-ANTENNA SYSTEM WITH HIGH ISOLATION FOR MOBILE PHONES 981

Fig. 7. Measured and simulated isolation between the main antenna and the
three auxiliary antennas.

Fig. 5. Photograph of the proposed four-element antenna system. (a) Front

view. (b) Back view.

Fig. 8. Measured and simulated isolation of three auxiliary antennas.

Fig. 6. Measured and simulated return loss of the main and auxiliary antennas.

larger than 6 dB, the length is selected to be 5 mm in the final

design.

III. RESULTS
The four-antenna system is fabricated and shown in Fig. 5.
The return loss for each antenna is measured, and the simulated
results obtained by HFSS [13] are given for reference. It can
be seen from Fig. 6, with the definition of 3:1 VSWR (6-dB re-
turn loss), the main antenna can successfully cover the lower
frequency band of 704–960 MHz and upper frequency band
of 1710–2690 MHz. For the three auxiliary antennas, the good
matching band is from 1880 to 2690 MHz. Due to the relative
position of the three antennas on board and the difference of the
current distribution, the return loss suffers some variance.
Fig. 7 shows the coupling between the main antenna and the
auxiliary antennas. It can be concluded that the coupling be-
tween the main antenna and the auxiliary antennas (S12, S13,
S14) is below 15 dB in the 700–3000-MHz band. The differ-
ence between them illustrates that the mutual coupling is related
with not only the distance, but also the relative position of the
antennas and the current distribution on the main board.
Fig. 9. ECCs of the four antennas.
Fig. 8 shows the coupling between the three auxiliary an-
tennas. It can be observed that the coupling is all below 15 dB
in the whole working frequency band. Moreover, the coupling
between Antenna 3 and Antenna 4 (S34) is below 22 dB. Fig. 9
presents the envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) character-
istics estimated by the -parameters [14]. In the working fre-
quency band of four antennas (1880–2690 MHz), their ECCs
are lower than 0.1.
Fig. 10 shows the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna
in the -plane, -plane, and -plane at 700, 900, 1900, and
982
Fig. 10. Simulated radiation patterns of the proposed antenna. (a)
(b) -plane. (c) -plane.
Fig. 11. Measured efficiency of the proposed antenna.
2400 MHz. As we can see, the antenna has a good omnidirec-
tional radiation.
Fig. 11 shows the measured efficiency of the proposed an-
tenna. The efficiency of the main antenna (Antenna 1) is higher
than 40% at the 640–1000- and 1600–2690-MHz bands, and
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 12, 2013
its maximum value can achieve 77%. The measured efficiency
of Antenna 2, Antenna 3, and Antenna 4 is nearly the same.
The measured efficiency of any auxiliary antenna is higher than
40% at the 1880–2690-MHz band, which can satisfy the require-
ments of the application.
IV. CONCLUSION
A four-antenna mobile terminal with high isolation has been
proposed. The main antenna and three auxiliary antennas are
reasonably designed and located on the circuit board. By the ap-
plication of coupling feeding, parasitic strips, and shorted strip,
the main antenna can successfully cover LTE700/2300/2500,
GSM850/900/1800/1900/UMTS, and 2.4-GHz WLAN bands.
By perpendicular arrangement, the three auxiliary antennas op-
erated well in 1880–2690 MHz with a small occupied space.
The measured isolation between any two antennas is greater
than 15 dB, and the measured efficiency reached 40% or above,
which shows the design presented here performs well. In the
future, we will broaden the auxiliary antennas to operate more
frequency bands.
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