6 December 2011
The initiative named “Beyond Next-Generation Mobile Broadband (BuNGee)” is under way. Organized under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), the BuNGee consortium’s objective is to increase the overall mobile network infrastructure capacity density to well beyond what current technologies promise. The project will continue until June 2012.
In order to prove the concepts proposed by BuNGee, towards the end of the project a live trial will be conducted in an urban environment which will represent the system in the real world and demonstrate the superiority of BuNGee’s architecture for mobile networks.
The deployment strategy will be based on below-rooftop location of access base stations utilising existing structures such as utility poles together with self backhauling of these access base stations by wireless links. Three antennas have been developed by Cobham Antenna Systems, Microwave Antennas for this application – a hub base station multi-beam antenna, a hub subscriber station antenna, and an access base station antenna, as illustrated. Finished working prototypes are now being tested to meet the challenging goal set by the Consortium of 1 Giga bit per second per square kilometre.
The consortium expects that this approach will drastically lower Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenses (OPEX) relative to traditional mobile deployment methods, thereby significantly lowering the bit per second per square kilometre cost of the access network.
