A mmWave Bridge Concept to Solve the Cellular Outdoor-to-Indoor Challenge

Wireless indoor coverage and data capacity are important aspects of cellular networks. With the ever-increasing data traffic, demand for more data capacity indoors is also growing. The lower frequencies of the legacy frequency bands of macro outdoor cells manage to provide coverage inside buildings, however, new frequencies foreseen for the 5th generation (5G) of mobile communications in the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum penetrate very poorly into buildings. Therefore, a massive densification of the network would require to deploy a large number of indoor small cells, which would lead to high deployment costs to install the necessary wired/optical backhaul. Hence, other methods are needed that allow an increase of the data capacity indoors, bearing a lower cost than a fiber deployment. We propose a cost-efficient out-of-band repeater architecture that provides more data capacity indoors than an outdoor macro/micro network can provide to indoor, without adversely affecting a legacy network, and which readily works with the established cellular infrastructure as well as standard handsets/smartphones. This proposal is compared to conventional in- and out-of-band repeaters and relay nodes in order to highlight the advantages of our solution. While the data capacity for a single link is similar to that of repeaters and relays, a macro cell can be effectively offloaded. Cell capacities corresponding to at least 3–4 times that of a repeater or relay solution can be provided, depending on the number of parallel installed links and the bandwidth in the mmWave spectrum.