Design and Implementation of Multi-Carrier Trapezoidal Antenna for O-RAN compliant 5G Indoor Small Cells Coverage

An antenna design is presented for the 5G mid-band applications involving shareable Open Radio Access Networks (ORAN). The proposed antenna design is composed of four trapezoidal patches which are fed through single microstrip feedline. The feedline is connected to the radiating trapezoidal patches in series fashion thus reducing the complexity of the design. The radiating surface is complemented by a similar but inverted design for the ground plane. A 2mm thick FR-4 substrate is used to fabricate the proposed antenna. Antenna was tested in the real-world environment after the simulation and fabrication of the prototype. The antenna was integrated with a prebuild ORAN radio unit (RU) and then it was connected to the private 5G core via a srsRAN based central unit (CU) and a distributed unit (DU). The simulated and experimental results depict that the proposed antenna offers omni-directive far-field radiation characteristics with impedance bandwidth ranging from 3.5 GHz to 3.8 GHz, making the proposed antenna a potential candidate for shared ORAN solution. The tested results depict a data rate of more than 100 Mbps and peak gain of 8dBi. The proposed antenna is suitable for a shareable ORAN solution that serves 3 operators each having bandwidth of 100 MHz in the CBRS band. The proposed design not only offers promising results for 5G indoor coverage but also has the potential to provide solution for neutral host companies offering shared infrastructure for mobile network operators (MNOs).