A compact 4-port coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna with enhanced isolation is proposed to operate from 3.66 GHz to 16.61 GHz with 127.78 % impedance bandwidth. The proposed antenna system consists of four orthogonal arrays of monopole antennas improved by four iterations.The UWB characteristic of the antenna is obtained from an improved monopole antenna fed by CPW. The final MIMO antenna is printed on a Rogers 4003C substrate with dimensions of 60 × 60 × 0.3 mm3.The orthogonal arrangement of antennas brings about the polarization diversity and certain isolation of MIMO antennas.Four rows of orthogonal metasurface elements with via holes and the ring of the backplane further improve the isolation between antenna elements in the MIMO system. The measured results of MIMO antenna agree with the simulated results. The MIMO antenna achieves an impedance bandwidth of 12.95 GHz with S11 < -10 dB and good isolation ( S21 = S41 < -30 dB and S31 < -20 dB). In particular, S31 is always less than -25 dB at frequencies greater than 6 GHz. The optimized MIMO antenna has the advantages of UWB, compact size, good radiation, and enhanced isolation, which shows that it has potential application value in UWB wireless communication systems.