Shielding Effectiveness of 5G Small-Cell Base Station Board-to-Board Connectors

5G small-cell base stations are featured by having massive electronics and signal processing hardware for the purpose of digital beamforming. This paper deals with important components within such 5G base stations which are the Board-to-Board (BtB) RF connectors that connect such electronic boards within the base station. It is attempted to introduce a simple and cost-effective simulation and measurement technique for determining shielding effectiveness (SE) in the near-field based on the IEC-61967-3 standard. A 16-channel BtB 5G system is investigated in the sub-6 GHz band as a real-scenario where the obtained results were proven to be highly accurate as compared to simulations.