A metropolitan area radio system using scanning pencil beams

A metropolitan-area radio system that, from a centrally located base station, provides continuously 360° coverage over a large service region is proposed. The base station blankets the service region with a raster of very narrow pencil beams that can be rapidly scanned to any position in synchronism with the switching sequences of a time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) assignment. By deploying multiple scanning spot beams, the allocated spectrum can be reused many times. A centralized network controller, executing an efficient TDMA assignment algorithm, dynamically allocates the resources of a small transceiver pool among the far larger number of beam positions in response to real-time requests for service. By varying the dwell time at each beam position in response to the traffic intensity of the position, highly efficient resource utilization is provided. The high antenna gain of the base station antenna provides adequate arain fade margin to permit operation in the uncongested portion of the ratio spectrum above 20 GHz. The system is particularly well suited to emerging, direct-to-end-user wideband digital service offerings