BASE STATION
ANTENNA PATTERNS
One of the most important determinant for human exposure is the power, configuration and antenna pattern of the nearest base stations. Researchers resort to guesstimated powers, arbitrary antenna element arrangements and generic patterns. Massive MIMO was conceived in academia and its implementation for mmWaves is being deployed as we speak.
The development of MaMIMO communication technology is now in the hands of the product departments of companies such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, etc.”
Emil Björnson et al, "Massive MIMO is a Reality—What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays," arXiv, Feb. 2019. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07678.
Plan A
From RAN suppliers
Ideally, we receive the full 3D antenna pattern for each antenna element in the radio unit directly from the manufacturer. To properly study the impact of beamforming, the arrangement of the antenna elements is required, along with the precoding scheme and power control. More data (e.g. frequencies, waveforms, polarizations, tilt, ...) is always welcome, but we would already be happy with parts of the required data.
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Plan B
From various agencies
When the data is too sensitive, either the manufacturer itself, mobile network operators, governmental agencies or others can provide rough parameters that give an idea of how the base stations operate, if they own the rights to do so. These can range from a singular value for the EIRP to the number of antenna elements, operating frequencies and more. Again, any data is better than no data, which is currently the case for most researchers (in particular for large coverage studies).
Plan C
From open-source generic patterns and datasets
Current solution
There are a multitude of options available for researchers to employ some generic antenna patterns, which are often unrealistic. A common option is one of the MIMO patterns universally agreed-on by the 3GPP consortium in TR 36.873 V12.7.0. There are datasets, some can be simulated ourselves and we have limited data from at least one mobile operator in-house.