Adding Indoor Capacity without Fiber Backhaul: An mmWave Bridge Prototype

Today, a large portion of mobile data traffic is consumed behind the shielding walls of buildings or in the Faraday cage of trains. This renders cellular network coverage from outdoor cell sites difficult. Indoor small cells and distributed antennas along train tracks are often considered as a solution, but the cost and the need for optical fiber backhaul are often prohibitive. To alleviate this issue, we describe an out-of-band repeater that converts a sub-6 GHz cell signal from a small cell installed at a cell tower to an mmWave frequency for the fronthaul to buildings or distributed antenna sites, where the signal is downconverted to the original frequency and emitted, for example, inside a building. This concept does not require fiber deployment, provides backward compatibility to equipment already in use, and additional indoor capacity is gained while outdoor networks are offloaded. The architecture and hardware prototype implementation is described, and measurements are reported to demonstrate the functionality and compatibility with commercial infrastructure and mobile terminals.