Antenna Array Design for Multi-Gbps mmWave Mobile Broadband Communication

Almost all cellular mobile communications including first generation analog systems, second generation digital systems, third generation WCDMA, and fourth generation OFDMA systems use Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band of radio spectrum with frequencies in the range of 300MHz-3GHz. This band of spectrum is becoming increasingly crowded due to spectacular growth in mobile data and other related services. More recently, there have been proposals to explore mmWave spectrum (3-300GHz) for commercial mobile applications due to its unique advantages such as spectrum availability and small component sizes. In this paper, we discuss system design aspects such as antenna array design, base station and mobile station requirements. We also provide system performance and SINR geometry results to demonstrate the feasibility of an outdoor mmWave mobile broadband communication system. We note that with adaptive antenna array beamforming, multi-Gbps data rates can be supported for mobile cellular deployments.