13th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP 2019)

Millimeter-wave technology and research trends for

5G Access and Wireless Transmission applications
An industry view
Renato Lombardi
Huawei Fellow
Chairman of ETSI ISG mWT
Head of Italy Research Center
VP Microwave Product Line
Milan, Italy
renato.lombardi@huawei.com

High interest in millimeter-wave bands has risen in the recent years due to the enormous amount of under-utilized bandwidth that
lies in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The significant advantages offered by the propagation characteristics in terms of
frequency re-usability and large channel bandwidths, make millimeter-wave suitable for the very high capacities required by 5G
enhanced Mobile BroadBand (10 Gpbs peak throughput and 10 Mbps/m2) both for the Radio Access Network and the Backhaul.
The millimeter-wave bands can be suitably used for the access networks to increase the throughput to the User Equipment and the
backhaul/front-haul of the base stations. At the same time the use of millimeter-wave bands, thanks to very compact antenna size
that makes products ``blend'' in the environment, allows the densification of the cells in dense urban scenarios.

5G key requirements driving evolution of mobile access and wireless x-haul to millimeter-wave and sub-millimeter ranges
Analysis of the most important requirements of 5G to drive the trends and technology at (sub-) millimeter-wave bands for
wireless backhaul / front-haul network
 Application scenarios and potential bands for 5G at millimeter-wave
 Massive MIMO architectures comparison
 how backhaul can meet the demand of capacity and network densification
 new spectrum above 90 GHz and innovative ways to use it
 technology challenges and research directions

Millimeter-wave access
Since the beginning, large antenna arrays have been exploited for radar applications in order to achieve very high spatial
resolution, beamforming and null steering. This trend has been recently introduced to communication systems too, in order to
provide highly-directive beams as a means to both reduce interference and increase the overall capacity, allowing spectral reuse
through spatial diversity. Nowadays the big challenge is not only related to the maximization of the overall system performance –
which has been proven to be very effective when considering full-phased/full-digital architectures - but is mainly focused on the
economic side: the real goal is to keep cost and energy consumption sufficiently low to obtain affordable products. In this invited
talk it will be presented an overview of some techniques that can be adopted to design energy- and cost-efficient antenna arrays
for millimeter-wave wireless systems (mm-Waves), which - having instantaneous bandwidths of hundreds of MHz to GHz - are
seen as promising technology for meeting the exploding capacity requirements of 5G (and beyond) communication networks.

Millimeter-wave backhaul
Research activities in the D-Band (130 to 175 GHz) for outdoor backhaul applications
 Standardization status
 Technology overview (semiconductor trends)
 MMIC, Antenna, Engineering solutions
 Propagation model from field trials results