Base station radome design for 5G and beyond

Increasing data use forces mobile communication to move higher carrier frequencies. The 71-76 GHz band has been newly assigned for communication use. The base station needs radome for protection against the environment. At millimeter waves, the thickness of the radome may become significant compared to the wavelength, making the radome design more challenging. In this manuscript, we design and manufacture two planar radomes, i.e., a single-layer radome and an A-sandwich radome with dielectric lenses. These two radomes are evaluated using maximum realized gain and a new metric gain envelope variation. The A-sandwich lens radome achieves higher realized gains with smaller gain envelope variation than traditional single-layer radome.