Beam Plotting For An Antenna Array: An Application In 5G FR2 UE

Abstract

Opinnäytetyön tarkoituksena oli kehittää vaiheistetun antenniryhmän säteilykuvion kartoittava sovellus Windows käyttöjärjestelmällä toimivalle PC:lle. Tällä sovelluksella voidaan kartoittaa 5G FR2 radio laitteiston sädekuvio simulointia käyttäen. Sovelluksen tarkoitus on helpottaa FR2 radio laitteiden ajuri kehityksessä.

The subject of this bachelor’s thesis was creating a graphical beam plotting feature for 5G FR2 mobile in a PC based hardware simulation tool. New millimeter-wave bands were introduced in 5Gstandards for high throughput communication. The FR2 bands can provide a significant bandwidth increase over previous generations, but the higher frequencies will also result in increased propagation losses. This is offsetted by the use of directional beams. A directional link between devices requires precise alignment of base station’s beam and mobile device’s beam. Such beam alignment is achieved with beam management. The thesis continues from the work previously done for the simulation tool. The purpose of this simulation tool is to verify the correctness of the RF driver functionality, based on trace data generated by the device. The purpose for the beam plotting feature created for the thesis is to visualize the radio beam created by the driver. This can be used to verify that the analog beam management is functioning as intended. Verifying that FR2 beam is controlled correctly can be challenging, because the analog beam shape is created by controlling phase shifter elements associated with each antenna element in an antenna array. This has to be done making timing more precise than what is possible to follow in real time by human. In the thesis RF driver related trace data from MediaTek’s 5G FR2 mobile device is used as source for simulations. The thesis was commissioned by MediaTek.

Two most significant parts of the work were extraction and interpretation of MediaTek’s 5G FR2 driver control data, studying millimeter-wave analog beam forming and implementing beam plotting capabilities for the simulation tool.

The simulation tool was created with the C++ programming language, using MediaTek’s internal development tools, Win32 API and the Qt library for the user interface.