This invention relates to wireless communications, and more particularly, to a radio communication system and a communication method between a base station and antennas for identification of the antennas and diagnosis of radio frequency (RF) components.
In wireless communication systems, particularly in outdoor scenarios (e.g. cellular communication systems, vehicle-to-wayside data communication, etc.) each radio base station may be equipped with several antennas which might be spatially separated by some distance from the base station hardware. Here, the term base station used throughout this invention generally refers to the transmitting/receiving entities of the stationary radio network infrastructure. That is, the term base station also covers Access Points of WLAN based systems, Radio Gateways of Wireless Sensor Networks, etc.
The antennas will typically be mounted in places that cannot easily be accessed, e.g. on roof tops of buildings, on high masts, etc. Even access to the base station hardware (e.g. for maintenance purposes) may be restricted. For example, in Communication Based Train Control (CBTC) systems, particularly in Mass Transit scenarios, base stations are typically installed close to the track and not accessible during hours of train operation. The possibility of performing certain maintenance tasks remotely or at least reducing the time needed for on-site maintenance activities is therefore quite important for ensuring a reliable operation with acceptable costs and effort.
At each base station location, one or more antennas may be connected. The purpose of connecting more than one antenna to a base station can be redundancy, antenna diversity, combination of multiple antennas to achieve some desired coverage pattern, etc. In the conventional art, connections between a base station 101 and N antennas 1031 to 103N are as shown in
Regarding the aspect of diagnosis of the RF path, current systems employ a concept of mutual monitoring of multiple radio interfaces. In the system currently installed in Guangzhou Line 4 Metro and Beijing Line 10 Metro, each base station has two independent radio interfaces, and RF propagation conditions between these radio interfaces, i.e. involving radio cards, cabling, antennas and radio channel between the corresponding antennas, are measured and evaluated in order to derive hints about defective or degraded components in the signal path. The scheme has some weaknesses due to the inherent transmission over-the-air and is also limited with respect to the identification of the faulty components, i.e. the localization of problems.
Therefore, in such systems the following practical challenges with respect to routine maintenance tasks arise and have been experienced in actual projects:
1. For reference purposes and post-installation troubleshooting and maintenance, it is desirable to maintain comprehensive documentation of the hardware components (e.g. antennas) used and of their characteristics and performance figures as measured before/during the installation. In principle this documentation could be based on a unique serial number printed on each component or attached to it in an electronically readable form, such as barcode or RFID tag. Since antennas cannot easily be accessed after installation, however, it will be hard to read the attached labels printed on the antennas or attached in an electronically readable form when for example it is required to verify correct assignment of antennas to base stations.
2. In order to guarantee the desired coverage, in multi-antenna systems it is essential that each antenna is connected to the correct RF port of the base station. Since in most cases it is impossible to optically trace back the antenna cable (i.e. RF cable) all the way back to the antenna, there is a large potential for mistakes in the assignment of antenna cables to RF ports of the base station. Careful labelling of the antenna cables at both ends can reduce the probability of mistakes, but labels may easily be torn off accidentally, fade over time, may be hard to read without detaching the cable, etc. Additional error sources come into play during maintenance tasks where for example cable pigtails (including labels) are exchanged.
3. Basic but reliable diagnosis functions for ensuring that the RF connection between base station and antenna is intact would be desirable, e.g. basic checking of the integrity of the cable connection and/or of the attenuation between base station and antenna.
A recent trend in cellular communication systems (e.g. 2G and 3G mobile phone networks) is the separation of the RF processing units from the base stations and their integration into so-called Remote Radio Heads which can be located close to the antenna and relatively far away from the bulky protocol and baseband processing units. The Remote Radio Heads are connected to the base stations typically through optical fibre. The approach is costly, requires highly specialized base station hardware and does not by itself solve the problems stated above. For most applications, the cost and complexity to extend the approach to address the above mentioned issues are prohibitively high.
In view of the above, a better way of supporting communication for maintenance and diagnosis purposes is needed between a base station and antennas, such as providing to the base station information relating to the antennas connected with the base station and/or information relating to RF connections connecting with the antennas.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a radio communication system and a communication method between a base station and antennas, so as to facilitate such as maintenance and identification of antennas, and/or diagnosis of radio frequency (RF) components.
A radio communication system includes: a base station and one or more antennas, each of the one or more antennas connects with a radio frequency (RF) port of the base station through an RF connection, wherein direct current and/or low frequency (DC/LF) signals are transmitted to an antenna via the RF connection corresponding to the antenna; and
an identification module at the antenna side, adapted to give an indication for identification of the antenna when receiving the DC/LF signals from the RF connection.
The identification module is a light emitter or a noise emitter.
The system further includes:
a first filter coupled between the RF port of the base station and a first end of the RF connection, adapted to overlay the DC/LF signals to an RF signal sent from the RF port of the base station, and apply the overlaid signals to the first end of the RF connection; and
a second filter coupled between a second end of the RF connection and the antenna, adapted to get the signals from the second end of the RF connection, and extract the RF signal and the DC/LF signals, separately, from the received signals, and provide the DC/LF signals to the identification module for indicating the antenna.
The system further includes: an identification module connected with the second filter, adapted to give an indication when receiving the DC/LF signals from the second filter.
The identification module is a light emitter or a noise emitter.
The system further includes: a first control module connected with the first filter, adapted to provide the DC/LF signals to the first filter.
The system further includes: a switch, adapted to connect and disconnect the first control module from the first filter.
The switch is a mechanical switch or an electronic or electromechanical switch controlled by a CPU or control logic in the base station.
The system further includes: a second control module set at the antenna side, adapted to receive the LF signals from the second filter, and power the identification module according to the LF signals.
The second control module is a microcontroller or programmable logic device.
The first control module is a power & communication module for providing the LF signals to the first filter, powering and performing data communication with the second control module via the LF signals.
The power & communication module is adapted to read ID and application related data of the antenna from the second control module, and/or write data into the second control module.
The system further includes: a user interface, adapted to supervise the operation of the power & communication module and/or display the information read out from the antenna side.
The system further includes: a radio module set at the antenna side, adapted to transform data received from the second control module to RF signals, and transform RF signals received from an RF coupling module into data to be sent to the second control module, wherein the RF signals are coupled to the RF path of the antenna via the RF coupling module; and
the second control module is further adapted to perform data communication with the base station via the radio module.
A method for communication between a base station and antennas includes:
overlaying direct current and/or low frequency (DC/LF) signals to an RF signal sent from one of the RF ports of the base station;
applying the overlaid signals to an RF connection corresponding to the RF port; and
extracting the DC/LF signal from the signals received from the RF connection to power an identification module set at the antenna side of the antenna corresponding to the RF port for indicating the antenna.
The method further includes:
transforming data stored in a second control module at the antenna side into RF signals;
coupling the RF signals from the second control module into the RF signal path of the base station;
sending the coupled signals via the RF connection to the base station.
The data include any of the following: basic information of the antenna, installation data, technical characteristics of the antenna, test signals generated periodically or on demand for diagnosis of RF components.
The method further includes:
transmitting, by the base station, RF signals containing data to be written to the second control module together with RF signals to be transmitted to the antenna via the RF connection;
splitting the RF signals received from the RF connection, and transforming the RF signals to be written to the second control module to obtain the corresponding data.
Compared to today's typical systems employing mostly passive antennas, embodiments of the present invention set a first filter at the base station side to overlay a DC/LF signal to an RF signal and transmit the overlaid signal to the antenna side, and set a second filter at the antenna side to recover the overlaid signal to obtain the DC/LF signal, thus providing a signaling channel between the base station and the antenna that can be used in various ways for simplifying maintenance tasks, allowing for a more comprehensive documentation and greatly simplifying the detection and analysis of failures or degradation of the RF signal path(s) between the base station and one or more antennas. Especially, in systems with a large number of base stations and possibly multiple antennas per base station, the availability of the system and its base stations are increased. The diagnosis functions can be easily integrated in an overall remote monitoring concept.
Moreover, the ideas can be applied as an add-on to existing systems without major changes to the existing hardware, and the technology for implementing the features described in the embodiments of the invention is readily available at reasonably low cost. Functionality and cost are easily scalable, depending on budget and required functionality.
To make the objective, technical solution and merits of the present invention clearer, the present invention is described hereinafter with reference to the following embodiments.
Referring to
The basis commonly used for all embodiments constituting this invention is the availability of a DC and/or low frequency connection between the antenna and the base station. This connection can be most efficiently established using the existing RF connection in combination with a couple of filters. The RF connection could be any kind of RF transmission line, typically a coaxial cable or a waveguide. In real practice, a so-called “bias tee” or other comparable filter structure can be used as the first or second filter shown in
The basic structure of a bias tee is depicted in
An embodiment of the radio communication system is depicted in
The base station side can read the ID and application related data remotely either by a separate reader equipment or by some entity (e.g. CPU board) within the base station itself. Examples for the abovementioned application related data include (but are not limited to):
1. basic information of the antenna, such as manufacturer, production date, type, number of the antenna
2. installation data, e.g. installation company, installation date
3. technical characteristics of the antenna, e.g. gain, pattern, impedance, voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) measured and/or according to manufacturers specifications
If the additional option of writing data from the base station side into the antenna is considered, it will be possible to keep a “history file” in the antenna containing information about which base stations the antenna has been connected to in the past. In combination with additional peripherals or integrated features of the microcontrollers in the antennas, it will be possible to store, for example, sensor data about operating conditions of the antenna, data about the alignment or direction of the antenna, and statistics about the RF power transmitted/received through the antenna.
The microcontroller 709 at the antenna side is extended by a radio interface, preferably based on the same standard as the base station itself. In real practice, the radio interface is realized by coupling a radio module 710 connected with the microcontroller 709 to the antenna 703. In WLAN based systems, for example, where the base stations operate according to one of the 802.11 standards, the radio interface at the antenna side can consist of an inexpensive 802.11a, 802.11b, and/or 802.11g module. The antenna's radio module 710 can be directly (i.e. galvanically) coupled to the RF path of the antenna 703 and RF cable 702, respectively, by a power splitter/combiner or similar RF component. The RF path of the antenna is used for communication between the base station and clients via the antenna, and it gets an additional use for data communication between the base station side and the antenna side in this embodiment. Or, the antenna's radio module 710 can be coupled to the antenna 703 indirectly by the electromagnetic field of the antenna and a suitable coupling element (e.g. dipole) at the radio module 710.
In railway communications, the base station 701 will typically include a CPU board with additional radio modules which can be accessed remotely through a wired network (such as the Ethernet). It is therefore possible with very little additional hardware effort to have the base station's CPU board handle the reading of antenna IDs and make the information about the assignment of antenna ports to antenna IDs available system-wide through the backbone network. Since communication with the microcontroller 709 could be done completely through the RF link by the base station 701 itself, the communication function realized by means of LF signalling in the power & communication module 706 becomes optional. That is, in addition to or as a replacement for the communication with the base station side using LF signalling, the microcontroller 709 can thus communicate with the base station 701 in the RF domain, i.e. in the same way that client devices communicate with the base station. When the base station just wants to check the antenna but is currently not communicating with any client, there won't be a signal transmitted to a client. However, the “channel” (i.e. the RF cable) and the communication method may be the same as if communicating with a client, i.e. from the base station's point of view, the antenna may just “look like a client”.
The procedure of performing data communication between base station and antenna sides in the RF domain is as follows.
The base station 701 transmits an RF signal containing data to be written to the microcontroller 709 via the RF cable 702 to an RF coupling module 711. The RF signal containing data to be written to the microcontroller 709 is provided to the radio module 710 connected with the microcontroller 709, and finally the data are written into the microcontroller 709. Optionally, the RF signal containing data to be written to the microcontroller 709 may be transmitted via the RF cable 702 together with an RF signal to be transmitted to clients.
Data stored in the microcontroller 709 can be read out and changed into an RF signal by the radio module 710, and the RF signal is coupled to the RF path used for communication between the base station and clients by using the RF coupling module 711 and sent to the base station 701 via the RF cable 702. There are basically two methods to couple the RF signal into the RF path: directly into the RF cable by a power splitter/combiner or similar component, which is in most cases some form of galvanic coupling; or indirectly through the antenna by means of a suitable coupling element (e.g. dipole) connected to the radio module 710 at the antenna side.
The scheme of
1. It can reduce the hardware complexity at the base station side. While communication through LF signalling requires additional hardware at the base station, the radio module allows communication between base station and antenna side using the existing RF interface of the base station. Only the power supply must be provided on the base station side, which is quite independent of the overall base station hardware and does not require any changes to the interfaces of the base station itself
2. In addition to the simple DC based cable integrity checks, the RF link between the antenna and the base station allows a number of RF tests to be executed in order to check the integrity of the RF chain. Such checks include but are not limited to:
(1) mutual signal strength measurement of the antenna and base station sides. The checks are as follows: the unit at the antenna side may periodically or on demand send test signals that are picked up and evaluated by the base station. Additionally or alternatively, the unit at the antenna side may evaluate the signal strength of signals sent out by the base station. Degradation of the RF components (such as cables, connectors, etc.) in the signal path can be detected by evaluation of the signal strength statistics.
(2) measuring signal strength of signals originating from other stations. To reliably detect and classify also degradation of the RF front ends of the radio modules (both at the antenna and base station side), signal strength of signals originating from other stations may be measured by the antenna unit and the base station and the measured values will then be compared. This test is particularly useful to distinguish degradation of cables/connectors from defects of the antenna side radio module.
In addition to the functionality described in
It should be pointed out that the user interface 712 shown in
To give a rough idea of the hardware cost in
By using the systems described above, a method for communication between a base station and an antenna for verification of correct antenna assignment is provided, including: overlaying a direct current and/or low frequency (DC/LF) signal to an RF signal sent from one of the RF ports of the base station, applying the overlaid signals to an RF connection corresponding to the RF port, extracting the DC/LF signal from the signals received from the RF connection to power an identification module set at the antenna side of the antenna corresponding to the RF port. Here, the DC/LF signal is provided by a first control module, and the first control module can be connected while the RF cable is still connected to the RF port of the base station.
Further, a method for checking the integrity of the RF cabling is illustrated. Assuming that the electrical characteristics of the light source and/or possibly some other additional or alternative electrical components at the antenna side are known, significant deviations of the values measured at the base station side from these known characteristic values indicate a faulty RF cable or faulty connectors. For example, the light source attached to the antenna may be a Light Emitting Diode (LED) in combination with a current limiting resistor. Measuring the forward and reverse resistance from the base station side will reveal interruptions as well as short circuits in the cable. It can be seen that although the RF properties of the cabling cannot be tested by this very simple method, some defects in the cables and connectors can be detected by measuring the DC/LF resistance at the bias tee at the base station side.
To sum up, the invention includes a set of technical solutions which can be combined in multiple ways and in combination provide all or a subset of the following features:
1. Unique identification of an antenna by an unambiguous code. The unambiguous code could be a serial number or some other unique identifier. Or, the unambiguous code maybe some number that is related to the position and installation date of the antenna, whatever the user or the manufacturer, system integrator, etc. The unambiguous code can be read out by the base station from the antenna side. Therefore, the identifier can be determined without detaching the antenna from the system and without having direct access to the antenna.
2. Optical identification of the antenna (out of a co-located set) that is connected to a particular RF port of the base station.
3. Logging of usage statistics (e.g. total hours of operation, connection time to particular RF ports etc.) within the antennas.
4. Basic integrity check of the RF path, wherein the RF path includes RF cables and RF front-end.
This description of the invention has been presented for the purposes of illustration and description. It is not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the invention to the precise form described, and many modifications and variations are possible in light of the teaching above. The embodiments were chosen and described in order to best explain the principles of the invention and its practical applications. This description will enable others skilled in the art to best utilize and practice the invention in various embodiments and with various modifications as are suited to a particular use.
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind | 371c Date |
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PCT/CN2009/071041 | 3/27/2009 | WO | 00 | 9/27/2011 |