High-Efficiency Front-End For Pico And Modular Large Base Stations

The achievement of high energetic efficiency is recommended not only from an economic point of view, but also as a versatile tool to command the performance of the phone cell, because the energy savings can be applied to one or more other improvements, including:

Larger reception range
Greater transmission speed
Better signal quality (lower BER)
Lower energy consumption on the base station
Increase of the mobile phone battery life

The key element to improving energy efficiency lies, fundamentally, in the use of active antennas. However, duplex operation of cellular phones greatly distorts the desired performance of active antennas. To correct this, one must deploy self-diplexed antennas1, since the diplexer loss irremediably reduces the figure of merit (G/T) and the transmission performance (EIRP).

Here, I will introduce the basic concept of design and performance obtained from a laboratory model front-end with the following features:

Modularity, which allows use in both pico (femto) cells and larger cells with higher modular antenna sizes, however they are reconfigurable (adaptive systems).
Bi-frequency (LTE bands 1 and 7)
In each reception band, two orthogonal beams are produced with ±45 degrees polarization. The transmission is co-polar with one of them; this means the front-end works with six orthogonal beams.
Antenna consisting of a 2x2 array of stacked patches; there are sixteen input ports per frequency band, fed by two Beamforming Networks (BFN) (one per band); the design of these devices leads to a high-performance, self-diplexed antenna with low losses.
Very low noise level LNAs with a built-in filter for protection against the transmitter couple
HPAs capable of handling up to 5W of power.

https://www.rfglobalnet.com/doc/high-efficiency-front-end-for-pico-and-modular-large-base-stations-at-lte-bands-and-0001

volver