Patch antenna array configuration for application in FD-MIMO systems

In this paper we present a practical 2-Dimensional (2D) active antenna array configuration for Full Dimension MIMO (FD-MIMO) systems. The basic antenna element is a 1H × 4V (i.e. 1 element in the horizontal and 4 in the vertical direction), patch antenna array referred to as sub-array, fed with a single port. The MIMO array is comprised of 8H × 4V such sub-arrays spaced at 0.5λH x 2λV, with a total of 32 ports. The antenna covers the 2.496-2.69GHz band with return loss > 12dB. The sub-array element has a gain of about 11.7dBi (including the 1.5dB feed network loss). To this end, with this particular configuration our calculations carried out by 3-Dimensional Spatial Channel Model (3D SCM) show that we can achieve about 3.1 times cell average throughput gain and 4.3 times cell edge throughput gain compared to the 4G LTE system of 2 antenna ports at the base station.