NEC Corporation has launched a prototype of the A4-sized massive-element active antenna system (AAS) for 5G small cell base stations. The low super high frequency band-compatible AAS combines the antenna and radio frequency (RF) components through a newly developed high density printed circuit board and an integrated circuit, which integrates the high RF circuit with the digital circuit, thus achieving a practical compact size.
In addition, the new AAS supports fully digitised operations of antenna beam control and precoding for multi-input multi-output systems. This improves the precision of beam forming and helps achieve high spectral efficiency, when user distribution is lopsided within a cell or there are frequent user movements within a cell. This contributes to the provisioning of high capacity communications. When used in conjunction with NEC’s spatial multiplexing technologies, the AAS can achieve more than ten times greater per cell throughput than the conventional long term evolution (LTE) base stations.
NEC has conducted a series of trials and experiments of 5G-related technologies with mobile operators such as NTT DOCOMO. NEC and NTT DOCOMO are now working on a new experiment using NEC’s AAS.
