Ground Base Station Antenna Design for Air-to-Ground Communications

The sixth generation (6G) of mobile communication networks aims to bring innovations in mobile broadband solutions and airborne communications. This paper proposes an antenna solution for direct air-to-ground (ATG) communications, particularly focusing on the challenges and potential of the digital airspace vision. The intra-and inter-cell interference caused by sidelobes of ground base station (BS) antennas and the bandwidth constraints at sub-6 GHz bands are important limitations. The paper introduces a ground BS antenna design for the 5.9-8.5 GHz band. The main contributions include wide-band, high-isolation antenna array concept for the ground BS antenna, along with an analysis of how the antenna array dimension affects the signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio and throughput in ATG systems.