Design and Testing of a Compact `Semi-Smart' Base Station Antenna in Cellular Networks

This paper presents a physical-level study on improving cellular-network system capacity by using the concept of semi-smart antennas. Practical implementation of the semi-smart antenna technology imposes several technical and environmental requirements on the antenna design. Therefore, novel cylindrically-conformal antenna array has been designed and tested. The new design is simple, robust, light and small in size (low profile), and most importantly, operates efficiently in providing dynamic radiation coverage in the azimuth plane. In comparison to the typical smart-antenna approach, semi-smart antenna technology has proven to be of much lower complexity and has minimal impact on the cellular system architecture.

[1]  Laurie G. Cuthbert,et al.  Towards intelligent geographic load balancing for mobile cellular networks , 2003, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part C.

[2]  DAN AVIDOR,et al.  On the financial impact of capacity-enhancing technologies to wireless operators , 2003, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[3]  Laurie G. Cuthbert,et al.  A bubble oscillation algorithm for distributed geographic load balancing in mobile networks , 2004, IEEE INFOCOM 2004.

[4]  Yan Li.  Paper Summary on: P. V. Viswanath, D. Tse and R. Laroia, Opportunistic Beamforming Using Dumb Antennas , 2005 .

[5]  Xiaodong Chen,et al.  Design and Testing of a Cylindrically-Conformal Array for Semi-Smart Antenna Base Stations , 2006, 2006 European Conference on Wireless Technology.

[6]  R. Jakoby,et al.  Semi-circular microstrip array on a planar reflector with extended beam-scanning range , 2003, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium. Digest. Held in conjunction with: USNC/CNC/URSI North American Radio Sci. Meeting (Cat. No.03CH37450).

[7]  Laurie G. Cuthbert,et al.  Cell size and shape adjustment depending on call traffic distribution , 2002, 2002 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Record. WCNC 2002 (Cat. No.02TH8609).

[8]  David Tse,et al.  Opportunistic beamforming using dumb antennas , 2002, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[9]  I. Forkel,et al.  The effect of electrical and mechanical antenna down-tilting in UMTS networks , 2002 .

[10]  Thomas Kaiser.  When will smart antennas be ready for the market? Part I , 2005 .

[11]  R. M. Buehrer,et al.  Intelligent antenna system for cdma2000 , 2002, IEEE Signal Process. Mag..