Concurrent Dual-Band, Low-Power O-RAN Compliant Radio for 5G Neutral Host Base Stations

Reducing transceiver complexity and power consumption are important design factors of next-generation radio communication systems. In this paper, a dual-band single-chain radio system is demonstrated. The Digital Front-End (DFE) is based on the AMD RFSoC <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{4}\times \mathbf{2}$</tex> platform, and the Radio Frequency Front-End (RF-FE) is based on a connectorised architecture using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products. Measured results characterise the error vector magnitude (EVM) and block error rate (BLER) of a dual-band, single-chain radio system across four modulation schemes, demonstrating comparable performance in both frequency bands. In addition, single-band measurements were conducted for comparison, revealing that the dual-band configuration maintains performance levels similar to those of the single-band setup. This highlights the advantages of the dual-band architecture, which supports multiple frequency bands without compromising performance. It significantly reduces transceiver complexity and power consumption, presenting a compelling alternative to implementing dual-band transceivers by duplicating radio chains.