Passive receiver subsystems for third generation cellular networks

Cellular networks planning has been affected by restrictions in the placement inside urban areas. This burden is motivated by public complaints on adverse effects in humans' health, despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence. As a result, some regulations are enforcing base station placement at suburban locations aimed toward urban areas. With this configuration, network capacity is severely reduced and, paradoxically, users will suffer from a higher radio exposure since terminals must raise up their power to reach suburban base stations. In this work, we propose a feasible solution to improve network capacity under these restrictive placement regulations in the context of UMTS networks. We introduce a passive receiver subsystem located in the urban area, while the Node-B is kept at the suburban location. Thereby, the power received from the Node-B could be considered negligible inside the urban area (since the active part is far away), and user equipments would transmit at lower power levels (since passive receivers are close to them). The results in this paper reveal that our approach improves network capacity (up to 21%) and notably reduces electromagnetic exposure compared to suburban installations. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2011.