The MULTI-BEAM5G project proposes and develops a photonic beamforming antenna radio access unit (RAU) based on optical ring resonators (ORRs) implemented on Si3N4, suitable for cloud-radio access networks (C-RAN) based on multi-core fibre (MCF), supporting 5G and beyond-5G (B5G) cellular radio in the mm-Wave spectral range up to 90 GHz.
The photonic beamformer RAU is designed to be suitable for indoor and outdoor operation in the MCF-based C-RAN and is capable of dynamically transfer capacity from one base-station to another via point-to-point links, with further support of digital massive-MIMO (mMIMO) in the beam, if desired. The proposed optical beamforming strategy in the mm-wave band enables exceptional network coverage and user capacity partially compensating the atmospheric attenuation impairments.