Communications Consortium tackles 4G LTE MIMO in airports

Communications Consortium tackles 4G LTE MIMO in airports

2013/07/05

Can a Cambridge company bring 4G MIMO to distributed antenna systems (DAS)?

DAS is a family of techniques that stretches the coverage of a single basestation throughout a large complex building, like a stadium or airport. It can be thought of as a low-cost alternative to multiple femtocells.

MIMO (multiple-in multiple-out) is an extension to 4G LTE, and other advanced mobile phone standards, that increases data bandwidth by using several antennas in the phone and several antennas at the basestation, combining signals from the resulting multiple wireless links.

In its simplest form, a DAS is a system of passive splitters, taps and coax cable connecting a conventional base station to many, perhaps hundreds, of small antennas dotted around the building – one per room for example.

A crucial feature of a DAS is that it should be ‘transparent’ – conveying signals to an un-modified basestation as though the basestation it was connected to a standard phone mast.

MIMO requires a minimum of two antennas to replace each single antenna, and for signals from both to be separately conveyed to the basestation.

With a simple DAS, this would mean doubling every component and cable.

“The brute force method to do MIMO is to use two signal paths, doubling the cost, but MIMO only adds 70% performance. It is no good getting 70% increase in performance for 100% increase in cost,” said Andy Bell, CTO of Zinwave, the Cambridge company concerned.

Zinwave offers a more complex, active, form of DAS.

“With coax, there is lots of loss and you only get 40W from the basestation. Most coax DAS run out covering 50,000ft2. Anymore and they need another basestation,” said Bell.

Coax systems can cover more area if amplifiers are included.

Amplifiers are naturally narrow band, argues Bell: for example, you need a UMTS amplifier with every GSM amplifier.

Instead, Zinwave has a wideband system – amplifying the entire 150MHz to 2.7GHz spectrum.

“I don’t believe, in the wireless world, there is a wideband system as wide as ours. To my knowledge, only the ECCM [electronic counter-countermeasures] system of the US Navy is wider,” said Bell.

Rather than coax, Zinwave uses optical fibre to transmit data. Its unique intellectual property is a way of modulating lasers that covers the bandwidth. Feedback around the link is used to maintain linearity and dynamic range in the signal path.

As part of an EU-funded project that has just started, along with several laser companies, Zinwave will develop a MIMO DAS using a single fibre to each antenna outpost to carry both signals from the MIMO antenna pair.

“The answer may be wavelength division multiplexing, there are several possibilities. It is unlikely to be time division multiplexing because that would mean modifying the signals,” said Bell.

The consortium plans to deliver a solution in 2015.

It’s commercial members are: Eblana Photonics (laser designers, Dublin), Innolume (laser makers, Dortmund), Constelex (photonic amplifiers, Greece) and Zinwave . Academic partners include the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (University of Cambridge), and the Tyndall Institute (University College Cork).

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