Performance Evaluation of Switched Beam Antenna with Different Configurations at 28 GHz

The main target of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a switched beam antenna in a macro-cellular environment at 28 GHz frequency. Another objective of this study is to compare the performance of a cellular system equipped with 7-beams switched beam antenna with conventional system implemented with wide 65◦ horizontal HPBW antenna. A campaign of 3D ray tracing simulations was carried out by using realistic 3D building data. Performance metrics considered for this study are RX level, SINR, system spectral efficiency, and the relative gain. Different configurations of 7-beams antenna is studied and the advantages and the disadvantages of considered configurations are highlighted in this paper. It is learned from the acquired results that an optimal configuration of 7-beams antenna can provide upto only 209.72 % of relative gain with respect to a traditional 3-sector site deployment. However, the relative performance gain of a 7-beam antenna can be negative under certain circumstances.