A Compact Printed Monopole Array with Defected Ground Structure to Reduce the Mutual Coupling

Strong mutual coupling between closely spaced elements in compact antenna arrays may cause significant system performance degradation, such as reduction in gain and signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, an efficient technique utilizing the defected ground structure (DGS) to reduce the mutual coupling between antenna elements is studied. A compact printed monopole array with a novel defected ground structure is proposed. Both simulated and measured results validate the effectiveness of the proposed structure in mutual coupling reduction while maintaining the compactness of the total array.