News

The BuNGee Project, Innovation in Communications Antenna Design

2 July 2012

The initiative named 'Beyond Next-Generation Mobile Broadband' (BuNGee) has been successfully completed. Organised under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7), the BuNGee Consortium's objective has been to increase the overall mobile network infrastructure capacity density to well beyond what current technologies promise. The 30 month project drew to a close at the end of June 2012.

In order to prove the concepts proposed by BuNGee, a live trial was conducted during April 2012 in Tel Aviv following over 2 years research and co-operation between the participating partners including Cobham Antenna Systems. The trial was witnessed by officers from the European Union responsible for funding the project. The trial environment closely emulated the system in the real world and rigorously demonstrated the superiority of the BuNGee architecture for mobile networks.

The deployment strategy is based on below-rooftop location of access base stations utilising existing structures such as utility poles together with self backhauling of these access base stations by wireless links. Three antennas have been developed by Cobham Antenna Systems for this application: a hub base station multi-beam antenna, a hub subscriber station antenna and an access base station antenna. Finished working prototypes were used in the live trial to meet the challenging goal of 1 Giga bit per second per square kilometre as set by the Consortium.

The Consortium expects that this approach will drastically lower Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenses (OPEX) relative to traditional mobile deployment methods, thereby significantly lowering the bit per second per square kilometre cost of the access network.

For more information or datasheets please contact us at newmarket.sales@cobham.com, or call us on +44 (0)1638 732177.

MORE INFORMATION:

The Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7)ec.europa.eu/research/fp7/index_en.cfm 

BuNGee PARTNERS:

For further information on the academic BuNGee partners visit: