Microwave Point-to-Point Systems in 4G Wireless Networks and Beyond

1. Introduction

As wireless carriers start to move towards 4G mobile technology, it is placing huge demands on their backhaul infrastructure. The multiple, high-bandwidth, quality-sensitive services that carriers have planned for 4G technology requires an infrastructure that is packet-based, scalable and resilient, as well as cost-effective to install, operate and manage.

Network physical links configuration and mediums used to connect nodes are some of most important problems of mobile communication network planning because they will determine the long-term performance and service quality of networks. We should not forget the fact that most of the traffic between the users on a wireless network still goes over some type of wireline transmission network (fiber, copper) and only the last few to a few hundred feet to the end-subscriber are really and truly wireless. Transmission network could also be designed using wireless backhaul i.e. microwave links.

In this paper we will focus on challenges wireless companies and their transmission engineers are facing in order to meet the capacity, reliability, performance, speed of deployment, and cost challenges in microwave point-to-point networks. Microwave networks, although very popular in the rest of the word, only recently have become a topic of interest in North American wireless networks. A reason for that is that so far Telco operators were able to provide T1 circuits (so-called leased T1 lines) in many places of interest to wireless operators; lately, requirements have changed and capacity requirements are becoming one of the main driving forces in searching for alternatives, namely – microwave systems.