Design of shaped reflector antennas for the applications of outdoor base station antennas in LTE mobile communications

This paper examines the radiation characteristics of a shaped reflector antenna applied as an outdoor base station antenna for mobile communications. A simpler architecture in a reflector antenna can reduce the implementation cost and complexity of a base station antenna. The aim of this reflector antenna design is to resemble the required radiation characteristics of conventional base station antennas, which employ a single-column phased array of antennas to radiate directional beam patterns for radio coverage in cell planning, while improving the existing drawback of overly large beam overlapping in adjacent sectors. It also discards the beam forming circuits of conventional base station antennas to reduce the level of passive intermodulation. This reflector antenna is fed by the elemental antenna of conventional base station antennas and is thus equipped with the functionalities of beam tilting and dual-polarization radiation to fulfill the requirements of adaptive sectorized cell adjustment. Both numerical simulation and measurement results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility.