Abstract
In this paper, a novel tunable tri-band antenna is presented for concurrent, multiband, and single chain radio receivers. The antenna is manufactured on a ${50}\times {100}$ mm FR4 printed circuit board, and is able to provide three concurrent, independently tunable operating bands covering a frequency range from 600 MHz to 2.7 GHz. The antenna performance is investigated for both numerical and experimental methods when using, first, varactor diodes and, second, digitally tunable capacitors (DTCs) to tune frequencies, which shows that the antenna gain can be improved by up to 2.6 dBi using DTCs. A hardware-in-the-loop test-bed provides a system level evaluation of the proposed antenna in a direct RF digitized, concurrent, and tri-band radio receiver. By measuring the receiver’s error vector magnitude, we demonstrate sufficient isolation between concurrent bands achieving 30 MHz of aggregated bandwidth as well as strong resilience to adjacent blockers next to each band. The data reported in this paper are available from the ORDA digital repository ( https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.5346295 ).
Highlights
T HE growing user traffic on radio access networks (RANs) requires the fifth generation (5G) of cellular mobile radio access technologies (RATs) to have higher area capacities, lower latencies and greater energy efficiency [1]
Instead of using multi-chain transceiver systems, one novel solution is to develop a single chain, concurrent, multi-band, frequency-agile radio (CM-FARAD) system, which is the focus of the UK EPSRC FARAD (Frequency Agile Radio) project [4]. To support such a concurrent multi-band (CM)-FARAD system, the antenna needs to provide multiple frequency bands simultaneously, with each band being independently tunable over the desired frequency range
The results show that the antenna can support three independently tunable operating bands simultaneously, over the frequency ranges 0.6–1.1 GHz, 1.0– 2.5 GHz and 1.9–2.7 GHz
Summary
T HE growing user traffic on radio access networks (RANs) requires the fifth generation (5G) of cellular mobile radio access technologies (RATs) to have higher area capacities, lower latencies and greater energy efficiency [1]. Instead of using multi-chain transceiver systems, one novel solution is to develop a single chain, concurrent, multi-band, frequency-agile radio (CM-FARAD) system, which is the focus of the UK EPSRC FARAD (Frequency Agile Radio) project [4] To support such a CM-FARAD system, the antenna needs to provide multiple frequency bands simultaneously, with each band being independently tunable over the desired frequency range. One of the limiting factors is the mutual coupling between radiating elements, which can manifest itself as an unwanted shift in the antenna resonant frequency due to the tuning of another band This will have a detrimental impact on the system performance, as often the antennas are narrowband over the frequencies of interest. The antenna supports three independent, continuously tunable operating bands covering a frequency range from 600 MHz to 2.7 GHz. Three tunable capacitors are used in the design as the active tuning components.
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