Article

The Growing Visual Impact of Wireless Antennas in the Urban Landscape: Strategies for Coexistence

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Abstract

A few decades ago, antennas were almost unnoticed in the urban and suburban landscape, except for home television receive antennas. At that time, such areas had a few AM, FM, and television broadcast antennas that were sometimes collocated (although less so in the United States) and served wide areas. The low-capacity land mobile radio systems that existed then also used antennas sited on relatively few high towers or building sites, covering large areas but with little total capacity compared to today’s cellular systems.

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... To comply with requirements of Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) (5G use cases [1]), and to cope with the associated growth of users and devices, the reduction of the coverage area (cell size) and the implementation of pico-cells is a trend in 5G [3]. However, the major issue associated with the reduction of covering areas is the consequent increase of cell number (to cover the same area) and thus, the excessive physical deployment of base station (or access point) antennas [3], causing a huge visual impact [4] particularly in dense urban locations. This leads to a high demand for hidden/concealed antennas with enclosures that allow for the reduction of the visual impact of such massive antenna deployment, e.g., antennas embedded in lump poles, fake trees or masked in building facades. ...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, a metamaterial-inspired flat beamsteering antenna for 5G applications is presented. The antenna, designed to operate in the 3.6 GHz at 5G frequency bands, presents an unique flat form factor which allows easy deployment and low visual impact in 5G dense scenarios. The antenna presents a multi-layer structure where a metamaterial inspired transmitarray enables the two-dimensional (2D) beamsteering, and an array of microstrip patch antennas is used as RF source. The use of metamaterials in antenna beamsteering allows the reduction of costly and complex phase-shifter networks by using discrete capacitor diodes to control the transmission phase-shifting and subsequently, the direction of the steering. According to simulations, the proposed antenna presents steering range up to ±20∘, achievable in both elevation and azimuth planes, independently. To prove the concept, a prototype of the antenna has been built and experimentally characterised inside an anechoic chamber. Although constructed in a different substrate (FR4 substrate) as initially designed, beamsteering ranges up to 8∘ in azimuth and 13∘ in elevation, limited to the proposed case-studies, are reported with the prototype, validating the antenna and the usefulness of the proposed design.
... However, the major issue associated with the reduction of covering areas is the consequent increase of cell number (to cover the same area) and thus, the excessive physical deployment of base station (or access point) antennas [2], causing a huge visual impact [3] particularly in dense urban locations. This leads to a high demand for hidden/ concealed antennas with enclosures that allow for the reduction of the visual impact of such massive antenna deployment, e.g. ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, a flat-beamsteering antenna for 5G applications is being presented. The antenna, designed to operate at 3.6 GHz (5G new radio (NR) frequency range 1 (FR1) band n78), presents a unique flat form factor which allows easy deployment and low visual impact in 5G dense scenarios. The antenna presents a multi-layer structure where a metamaterial inspired transmitarray enables the two-dimensional (2D) beamsteering, and an array of microstrip patch antennas is utilised as RF source. The use of metamaterials for beamsteering control allows for the reduction of costly and complex phase-shifter networks by using discrete capacitor diodes to control the transmission phase-shifting and subsequently, the direction of the steering. According to simulations, the proposed antenna presents 13.9 dBi of gain, 100 MHz of bandwidth with a maximum steering range of ±20 degrees, achievable in both elevation and azimuth planes, independently.
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