Moving Towards Mmwave-Based Beyond-4G (B-4G) Technology

Availability of large untapped spectrum resources in the millimeter wave (Mmwave) band is suitable for providing a gigabit experience with true local feel using high capacity small cells. Unlike traditional cellular systems, millimeter wave transmissions do not benefit from diffraction and dispersion making it difficult for them to propagate around obstacles thus resulting in higher shadowing loss. They also have less favorable link budgets due to lower power amplifier (PA) output powers and greater pathloss at these higher frequencies. Also, current costs of the Mmwave circuits are higher, but the costs will become much lower when the technology becomes mainstream. One advantage of millimeter wave, however, is that the smaller wavelengths allow for the fabrication of antenna arrays having a much higher number of antenna elements in a much smaller area than is typical at microwave bands. In this article, we outline a framework for Beyond-4G (B-4G) local area network in the millimeter wave band for both access and backhaul including air-interface, antenna-arrays and IC technology. It is shown that Mmwave B-4G small cell technology can provide peak and cell edge rates greater than 10 Gbps and 100 Mbps respectively with latency less than 1msec for local area network.