Design of Shaped Reflector Antennas for the Applications of Outdoor Base Station Antennas in LTE Mobile Communications

Abstract

This paper examines the radiation characteristics of a shaped reflector antenna applied as an outdoor base station antenna for mobile communications. A simpler architecture in a reflector antenna can reduce the implementation cost and complexity of a base station antenna. The aim of this reflector antenna design is to resemble the required radiation characteristics of conventional base station antennas, which employ a single‐column phased array of antennas to radiate directional beam patterns for radio coverage in cell planning, while improving the existing drawback of overly large beam overlapping in adjacent sectors. It also discards the beam forming circuits of conventional base station antennas to reduce the level of passive intermodulation. This reflector antenna is fed by the elemental antenna of conventional base station antennas and is thus equipped with the functionalities of beam tilting and dual‐polarization radiation to fulfill the requirements of adaptive sectorized cell adjustment. Both numerical simulation and measurement results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility.

A Dual-Band Low-Profile Microstrip Antenna with Fan-Shaped and Rectangular Beams

“…Sector beams [10,11] can provide relatively wide azimuth beam widths and have the great advantage of wide signal coverage. Moreover, since sector beam antennas cover a wide range of space, they are commonly used in mobile phones and point-to-point wireless communication systems, as well as base station antennas that form sector coverage in more complex terrain environments such as towns and mountains [12,13]. Therefore, it is very important to study how to design high-performance sector beam antennas.…”