6 April 2010
Cobham Antenna Systems has been awarded a contract to participate in a consortium on a new initiative named Beyond Next Generation (BuNGee) aimed at achieving a tenfold increase in mobile broadband infrastructure capacity.
The 4.7 million euro initiative is funded largely by the European Commission and will draw upon collaboration among the consortium members comprising European service providers, technology equipment vendors, universities and research organisations.
Organised under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Developent (FP7), the BuNGee consortium's objective will be to increase the overall mobile network infrastructure capacity density to beyond what is promised by current technologies, targeting the challenging goal of 1 Gigabit per second per square kilometer.
The project will identify network deployment strategies especially suited for dense urban environments where the demand for wireless broadband access is highest. The BuNGee project is planned to continue through June 2012.
The success of this project is critically dependent upon achieving the correct antenna beam characteristics to support high density communications networks.
The project will require switched beam Hub Base Station antennas capable of achieving high isolation with other beams within the sector. In order to support the MIMO architecture that will be used, these switched multi-beam antennas will be dual polarised. The Hub Base Station antennas will be deployed above rooftop level and communicate with below rooftop level Access Base Station antennas that will achieve links with mobile subscribers.
Cobham will be responsible for the design of appropriate individual radiating elements which will be optimized by EM simulation, the development of arrays of these structures, and the provision of a beam forming network that will control the various antenna beam shapes. Antennas will then be provided for field trials.
The consortium consists of lead partner Alvarion (Israel), Cobham Antenna Systems, Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (Spain), University of York (UK), Thales Communications SA (France), Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (Poland), Siklu Communication Ltd (Israel) and ARTTIC (Belgium).
To achieve its stated objetives, the BuNGee project will target the following breakthroughs:
- Unprecedented joint design of access and backhaul over licensed and license-exempt spectrum
- Unconventional below-rooftop backbone solutions exploiting natural radio isolations
- Beyond next-generation networked and distributed MIMO and interference techniques
- Autonomous architectures capitalising on very aggressive spatial and spectral reuse
- Protocol suite facilitating autonomous ultra-high capacity deployment
