Development of Small Base Station with Low-Complexity RF

As a research project of KAIST Institute for IT Convergence, Professor Ju Yong Lee’s research team has developed a Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A)-based small base station. The integrated antenna structure with half wavelength size can transmit four multiple streams. The low-complexity, multi-band RF chip can directly modulate baseband I/Q signal from the RF stage through impedance loading without using the IF band signal processing, DAC, mixer, and filter (PA front end) of existing communication systems. In the KT commercial test network, we achieved up to 293 Mbps capacity through 4×4 MIMO implementation in an LTE-A 20 MHz environment.

This work has been selected as one of the top 100 R&D projects in 2017 by the Ministry of Science and Information and Communications Technology (ICT). This technology can be applied to massive MIMO or mmWave band systems for 5th -generation mobile communication.