Millimeter-wave Gbps Broadband Evolution towards 5G: Fixed Access and Backhaul

As wireless communication evolves towards 5G, both fixed broadband and mobile broadband will play a crucial part in providing the Gbps infrastructure for a connected society. This paper proposes a Millimeter-wave Gbps Broadband (MGB) system as the solution to two critical problems in this evolution: last-mile access for fixed broadband and small cell backhaul for mobile broadband. The key idea is to use spectrum that is already available in the millimeter wave bands for fixed wireless access with optimized dynamic beamforming and massive MIMO infrastructure to achieve high capacity with wide area coverage. This paper explains the MGB concept and describes potential array architectures for realizing the system. Simulations demonstrate that with 500 MHz of bandwidth (at 39 GHz band) and 28 dBm transmission power (55 dBm EIRP), it is possible to provide more than 11 Gbps backhaul capacity for 96 small cells within 1-km radius. Index Terms — 5G, Millimeter wave communication, massive MIMO, small cells, phased antenna array