In this paper, a novel antenna decoupling approach is investigated. The introduced concept is based on expelling the currents flowing between the closely spaced antennas through a tapered slot etched on the array ground plane. The method is free from extra-reactive components and transmission lines. Although they are closely spaced and strongly coupled, the technique allows a high improvement in port isolation. A practical implementation of this mechanism is applied to a monopole-array of two elements working at 2.45GHz and closely packed (0.069λ0). The obtained results are very attractive and a decoupling of about 40 dB is achieved with good impedance matching. Moreover, radiation diversity is obtained with a gain of 1.9 dBi. Furthermore, the decoupled array is integrated in a real receiving system and the proposed decoupling technique is checked through array signal processing. Hence, obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed decoupling mechanism. In addition to its efficient port isolation, the most attractive features of the proposed decoupling technique are simplicity and ease of implementation in compact multi-antenna devices.

In this work, an UWB/narrow band reconfigurable elliptical-shaped monopole antenna for cognitive radio applications with sequential perception and operation modes is presented. The proposed approach consists in integrating a reconfigurable filter, in an UWB antenna ground plan, by the mean of four horizontal slots and integrated switches that allow inserting/removing/varying zeros and poles in the frequency response. By acting on the slot lengths in order to alter their resonance frequencies, the different switch configurations allow the antenna to switch between an UWB mode that could be used for the perception (sensing) and different narrowband modes, mono-band and dual-band, that could be used for the operation at 2.4 or/and 3.5 GHz. To validate the concept, an experimental prototype has been fabricated and a good agreement between the simulated and the measured S-parameters has been obtained. While the presented work uses the presence/absence of a perfect conductive strip (PEC) to model real switch operation, it is believed that the obtained results conjugated with previous work using real switches on a very similar structure allows validating approach.