15 Jun 2020 Cambium ePMP 2000 Smart Beamforming Antenna

Posted at 11:34h in Cambium Networks by Carla Nadin

Cambium Networks ePMP 2000

Smart Beamforming Antenna

Video presented by Harry Drewett (Wireless Solutions Engineer)

This blog post will outline everything you always wanted to know about the ePMP 2000 Smart Beamforming antenna. It’s a smart bit of kit if you’ll pardon the pun! Here, we outline what makes it so clever and how it helps in combating channel inference in a network, dramatically reducing uplink interference in a sector deployment. This can have an impressive impact on the overall network capacity with up to eight times more uplink throughput-increases over its ePMP 1000 counterpart, in ‘normal’ conditions. This means that with the Smart Beamforming antenna, the whole network performance is optimised. Let’s have a deeper dive.

BIT SHORT ON TIME?

WATCH THE DEMO RIGHT HERE (4:55)

What Is Co-Channel Interference?

In the simplest terms, co-channel interference (CCI) is congestion. When two or more devices are operating on the same frequency channel, the CCI forces devices to queue, deferring their transmission until the channel becomes free. This slows everything down.

In a wireless network, CCI is actually more negatively impactful than adjacent channel interference. Channel filtering is not an option since the interferer is transmitting on the same channel as the access point.

That’s where the sector antenna comes in. The sector antenna is forcing the access point to ‘listen’ to any co-channel inference in its azimuth and this, therefore, limits network performance. The access point will typically use either a 90deg or 120deg beamwidth sector antenna. This means that the AP must ‘listen’ to any co-channel interference within that 90deg or 120deg beam width, limiting network performance.

ADDRESSING CO-CHANNEL INTERFERENCE WITH EPMP 2000 SMART BEAMFORMING

Co-channel interference caused by transmissions in the same channel is a major issue to wireless networks. Cambium has an answer to this though. The solution is the Smart Beamforming antenna on the ePMP2000 and 3000.

The ePMP smart antenna dynamically creates a narrow, much more targeted beam to each individual subscriber whilst blocking out interference from elsewhere. Clever stuff. The video above provides a demonstration of this and how it works.

Smart Beamforming is performed by the ePMP 2000 / 3000 Smart Antenna, which is an uplink-only antenna, but the sector antenna is still used for transmissions from the access point.

The interferer must be a certain angle away from the subscriber to see the most performance increase. Even if some subscribers in a sector were too close to the interferer, others would still see a significant benefit, boosting sector performance substantially.

ePMP SMART BEAMFORMING IN SUMMARY

Smart Beamforming creates a narrow, targeted beam to each subscriber the access point wants to ‘listen’ to when it is time for that subscriber to transmit.
By creating a narrow ‘PTP-like’ beam dynamically from the access point to each subscriber, in sequence, the access point limits the interference it hears.
Beams are created automatically with no user intervention required.
No change to subscriber modules is required.
This has a dramatic impact on network performance.

ePMP 2000: GENERATION II – THE SNAPSHOT

ePMP2000 – Reduces self-interference and mitigates the impact of external interference in an affordable solution.
All the scalability, capacity benefits of ePMP1000
Dynamic filtering to battle neighbouring channel interference
Beam Steering in the uplink to fight the most common source of co-channel interference