Design Innovative High-Gain MIMO Cylindrical DRA With Surface-Mounted Horn for Enhanced WLAN Connectivity

This work presents a novel Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (CDRA) integrated with a surface-mounted horn for 5.8 GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) applications. The horn integration enhances the realized gain to 14 dBi while maintaining high port-to-port isolation (>20 dB) and a low envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), ensuring robust diversity performance. A single cylindrical radiator is excited by dual coaxial feeds, achieving a compact geometry and efficient MIMO operation. Channel capacity loss (CCL), mean effective gain (MEG), total active reflection coefficient (TARC), and diversity gain (DG) are analyzed through full-wave HFSS simulations and validated experimentally. An equivalent circuit model is also developed, showing strong agreement with the measured results. The proposed antenna demonstrates excellent potential for compact, high-gain, and high-isolation MIMO systems in next-generation WLAN applications.