EISL, the Pendant to EIRP: A Measure for the Receive Performance of Base Stations at the Air Interface

This paper presents a new method to compare the receiving performance of different types of base stations (BS) in consideration of their architecture, the system noise and the antenna performance. The usual measure to indicate the transmitting performance and coverage of a BS is the equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP). On the receiving side, no such measure has so far been introduced. Active antennas with down tilt features, the received noise and noise, which is added at different locations in the signal path as well as varying RF-front-end-architectures make it difficult to compare the sensitivity of different base station architectures. Therefore a new measure will be introduced in this paper, the so-called equivalent isotropic sensitivity level (EISL). This measure makes it possible to compare different types of base station architectures in terms of their real sensitivity right at the air interface with respect to the system architecture and noise. Finally, EISL will be used to compare different base station concepts and to show the influence of the antenna down tilt on the effective usable sensitivity of a base station.