Fixed and Mobile Broadband Wireless Access Networks Employing Optically Beam-formed Antennas

J. Mart, J.L. Corral, V. Polo and J. Herrera E.T.S.I. Telecomunicacin Cam de Vera s/n 46071 Valencia (SPAIN) e-mail: jmarti@dcom.upv.es Abstract
Broadband wireless access networks that operate in the millimetre-wave frequency band are envisaged to fulfil the bandwidth requirements of broadband multimedia services. At these frequencies, temporary obstacles and adverse meteorological conditions may drastically impair on the system performance by intercepting the required line-of-sight radio wave propagation, which results in degrading the system. Base station antennas with beamforming capabilities are envisaged to address dynamically changes in the network features and resources in order to overcome the service unavailability arising from man-made and natural impairments. Traditional DSP-based and RF/IF beamforming, which have limited performance for millimetre-wave frequency operation. The OBANET project is aimed to the design, implementation and test of optically beam-formed antennas, which are the most promising alternative to such beamforming approaches, due to the huge bandwidth, low-loss and weight provided by optical fibre devices. In addition, OBANET project aims at designing and testing specific coverage area management strategies as well as their associated technologies for performance optimisation in broadband adaptive broadband wireless access networks in two scenarios: fixed and mobile broadband radio accesses in the 40 GHz.

I. Introduction
Broadband wireless access networks that operate in the millimetre-wave frequency band are envisaged to fulfil the bandwidth requirements of broadband multimedia services, which are expected to experience a tremendous growth in the next five years [1]. The provision of these services requires high-performance and high-reliable communication networks for both the access and the transport parts [2]. At these frequencies, temporary obstacles and adverse meteorological conditions may drastically impair on the system performance by intercepting the required line-of-sight radio wave propagation, which results in degrading the system performance, and even more, making the system unavailable [3]. Base station antennas with beamforming capabilities are envisaged to address dynamically changes in the network features and resources in order to overcome the service unavailability arising from man-made and natural impairments [4-6]. Traditionally, beamforming is achieved by means of DSP-based and RF/IF signal processing, which have limited performance for millimetre-wave frequency operation. Optically beamformed antennas [7] are the most promising alternative to such beam-forming approaches, due to the huge bandwidth, low-loss and weight provided by optical fibre devices [8]. The IST-2000-25390 OBANET

project (http://ist-obanet.upv.es) is aimed to design and test base-station antennas with beamforming capabilities implemented in the optical domain. OBANET project aims at designing and testing specific coverage area management strategies as well as their associated technologies for performance optimisation in adaptive wireless access networks in two scenarios: fixed and mobile broadband radio accesses in the 40 GHz band. High-performance optoelectronic devices and photonic integrated circuits composing the optical beamformers will be developed, using dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) and photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technologies. In addition, coverage area management strategies and control/monitoring protocols for fixed and mobile radio accesses will be developed within OBANET project. An specific medium access control protocol for adaptive fixed and mobile broadband access networks will be proposed.

II. System description.

Figure 1 depicts the general network architecture of a broadband wireless access network for both fixed and mobile broadband radio accesses. The main difference between fixed and mobile wireless access network scenarios rely on the usual shape and size of the cells composing the coverage service area. Some other service planing parameters such as sectors per cell, radio-wave polarisation, size of the cell cluster (group of cells using different frequencies), frequency reuse plans, frequency band, etc, are also intrinsically different in each scenario. Different system performance degradation mechanisms are expected in fixed and mobile access networks, mainly due to the user mobility of in the latter one. Thus, different coverage area management strategies are addressed in both wireless access networks to overcome quality-of-service (QoS) drops.

CELL

CONTROL STATION

BASE STATION OPTICAL FIBRE

COVERAGE AREA

Figure 1. Typical scenario for a cell-divided service area in wireless access networks. Next, individual scenarios for fixed and mobile networks are considered.

II.A Broadband adaptive fixed wireless access networks (BAFAN) BAFAN operating at the 40.5-42.5 GHz band is the main target scenario of this project. It is well known that the system performance of conventional Multipoint Video Distribution Systems (MVDS) is sharply limited when line-of-sight radio-wave propagation between base station and customer antennas is intercepted (e.g. ACTS-project CRABS). Moreover, intensive rainfalls in some cells of the service area may also severely impair on the system performance. Centralised management strategies based on varying dynamically the base station antenna pattern (adaptive beam-forming and beam-steering) to counter system performance degradations will be proposed and implemented. These strategies are mainly oriented to: (i) overcome quality-of-service loss due to man-made (e.g. provisional obstacles intercepting the required line-of-sight radio propagation between base station and service users) or natural (e.g. intensive rainfalls whose propagation losses may not be compensated for using power transmitting strategies) impairments. (ii) use efficiently the network resources (available bandwidth and capacity) in its different deployment phases. The base station antenna pattern will be adapted to specific network environmental propagation issues.

BAFAN operate at millimetre-wave frequency bands, which offer larger channel allocation. At these frequency bands the service area is divided in small cells or sectors (pico-sectors or pico-cells). Therefore, many of base stations are required for service provision, which impose a stringent limitation on the base station equipment cost. Low/moderate base station cost may be achieved by using telecom-market-oriented photonic integrated technology for implementing antenna beam-formers.

Figure 2 illustrates four 90-degrees sectorised cells in a BAFAN. The plot on the left shows the crosspolarised base station antenna beams as a normal operating mode. In the plot on the right is sketched how the base station antennas may vary their patterns features to counter three different performance degradation mechanisms: interference sources by means of antenna beam-steering, increasing the number of sectors of cells to allow a moderate increase of the radio-wave link power budget (polarisation diversity transceiver must be used) and generating highly directive dedicated beams. The latter may be used to compensate for scattering losses introduced by provisional obstacles intercepting the line-of-sight link between base station and user antennas.

90 Sector

BEAM STEERING

Interference Source

V H

V H V
Polarization Diversity V H H

H V H H V
V

Highly-Directional User Antennas

Dedicated Beam

V H

NORMAL SITUATION

ANOMALOUS SITUATIONS

Figure 2. Normal (left) and anomalous (right) operating conditions in BAFAN. II.B Broadband adaptive mobile wireless access networks (BAMAN) Mobile broadband systems operating in the millimetre-wave (mm-wave) band (f>30 GHz) are envisaged to support real-time interactive multimedia services based on high-definition TV. This is the second scenario addressed by this work. Mm-wave mobile and movable broadband terminals will have a transmission capacity exceeding 100 Mbit/s. Owing to the high attenuation introduced by the atmosphere, specially at the oxygen molecular absorption band (>17 dB/km), the service area is divided in pico-cells (diameters about 100 metres), which allow efficient frequency reuse plans with very high frequency repetition rate. Excess attenuation losses due to multipath and scattered radio-waves limit severely the performance such mobile systems, which may result in a transmission capacity reduction for users sited on coverage area borders (dynamically assigned capacity is supposed in these systems. In order to overcome these situations beam division multiple access (BDMA) was proposed (RACE-project MBS, [9]). Dedicated base station antenna beams for certain users or users groups in a pico-cell may ensure high quality-of-service, as required by demanding broadband IP multimedia applications. In addition, it is desirable that the beam features dynamically adapt to user and systems requirements (beam width-directivity, beam direction, etc). These base station antenna features are target in this project. MBS project envisioned to provide between 34 Mbit/s and 155 Mbit/s to each user. A hybrid fibre-radio architecture with an ATM radio section seems to be particularly well suited for MBS services provision [2].

II.C. Proposed scenario. What we propose in OBANET is to demonstrate the feasibility of optical beamforming in a test platform with specifications that emulate a realistic scenario with the following characteristics:

Y Y Y

Four 90 sectors per cluster/BS A directive beam that switches between users on a time-slot/frame basis Multi-level modulation formats.

Y Y Y Y

Cell size: BAFAN: 1 km BAMAN: up to 100 m Duplexing technique: TDD Multiple Access Scheme: TDMA Bit rates up to 155 Mbit/s

Figure 3 shows a schematic of the envisaged scenario: a single beam is switched between users on a timeslot frame-interval basis. A basic frame structure is depicted in the same figure.

t1 u1 t2 u2 tN uN BS

Switching time
CONTROL CONTROL

u1, t1

u2, t2

uN, tN

Figure 3.- Proposed scenario.

III MAC definition.

Usually MAC protocols are not designed to cope with directed adaptive antennas and beam switching such as the proposed in the previously defined scenarios [10]. The main problem is that broadcast and multiple access capabilities are always required for all stations in the coverage area. Thus protocols have to be adapted to the scenario which results in a larger protocol overhead and less efficiency. This disadvantages should be overcome with the benefits of adaptive antennas.

The MAC protocol definition for this project must be based in the following directives: The definition should be in agreement with near term and future standards for wireless and mobile access networks: ETSI BRAN HIPERACCESS [11], MBS Dynamic Slot Allocation [9] and specially IEEE 802.16.1 [12]).

The definition must be adapted for SDMA, adaptive antennas and beam-switching techniques. The modifications required for the protocol adaptation to OBANET scenarios should be as much compliant as possible with the standard.

The definition must be applicable for both fixed and mobile OBANET scenarios (if possible). The definition should be as flexible as possible to allow different approximations to the scenarios.

The proposed beam-switching technique is optimal for a time based MAC, so the TDD duplex and TDMA multiple access are chosen. A wide range of benefits can be obtained for this choice [13], [14]: TDD has been used for a large time in the design of point to multipoint access networks. A time based MAC is optimum for transport of digital data, which means asymmetric, burst and unpredictable traffic. And also for dynamic bandwidth requirements. TDD only needs one RF channel and no duplexor is needed. Less stringent power control due to reduced inter-user interference because of dedicated slots. The burst transmission allows measurement slots for mobile assisted hand-over and energy save. Both TDD and TDMA techniques are contemplated in the IEEE 802.16.1 standard.

On the other hand, time-based techniques suffer the following disadvantages: High data rates implies need for equalisation. Requires guard times, at least the round-trip propagation delay between stations. There is a complexity inherent to slot allocation and synchronisation.

The 802.16.1 frame (see fig. 4) has been adopted for the MAC definition. In the case of TDD, the upstream and downstream transmission share the same frequency, but they are separated in time. A TDD frame also has a fixed duration and contains one downstream and one upstream sub-frame and is divided into an integer number of PS. The framing is adaptive in the sense that the downstream and upstream dedicated bandwidth can be modified depending upon traffic requirements.

)UDPH M

)UDPH M

)UDPH M

)UDPH M )UDPH M

7'' )UDPH 6WUXFWXUH

$GDSWDWLYH 3K\VLFDO 6ORW

'RZQVWUHDP 6XEIUDPH

8SVWUHDP 6XEIUDPH

Figure 4. IEEE 802.16.1 Proposed Frame Structure.

IV Demonstration platform
OBANET is intended to demonstrate a Photonic Integrated Beamformer (PIB) operating at the 40 GHz band on a test-bed. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a wireless access system employing optical beam-formed networks is going to be demonstrated. First, the demonstration will be carried out using discrete commercial devices and design parameters for PIB system will be extracted from such discrete beam-former. Using the design specifications derived from the discrete beam-former experiments, photonic integrated beam-formers will be implemented, for the first time, using a technology traditionally devoted to the manufacturing of DWDM components. Also innovative techniques devoted to the optimisation of the joint integration of optical and electrical microwave monolithic integrated circuits (MMIC) on the same chip will be developed, mainly focusing in the photodetection process. Finally, once the PIB is fully manufactured, it will be integrated on the demonstration platform and its performance evaluated.

Figure 4. Laboratory platform to carry out the performance evaluation of PIB.

VI Conclusions
The use of optical beam-forming techniques to provide telecom-market oriented services will push the emergence of novel commercial applications of optical beam-forming networks. In addition, the combination of DWDM technologies, already employed in modern communication networks and photonic integrated circuits will significantly reduce the production cost, which provides a scale advantage.

Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the European Commission for funding the project IST-2000-25390.

References
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