EISL, the Pendant to EIRP: A Measure for the Receive

Performance of Base Stations at the Air Interface

Georg Fischer, Florian Pivit*, Werner Wiesbeck*
Lucent Technologies, Wireless Advanced Technology Lab, Thum-und-Taxis-StraBe 10, 90411 Niirnberg, Germany
Phone: (+49) 911 - 526 - 3893, email: georgfischerglucent.com
*Institut fir H6chstfrequenztechnik und Elektronik, Universitat Karlsruhe, KaiserstraBe 12, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany
Phone: (+49) 721 - 608 - 2523, email: 1

Abstract This paper presents a new method to compare the receiving performance of different types of base
stations (BS) in consideration of their architecture, the system noise and the antenna performance. The usual
measure to indicate the transmitting performance and coverage of a BS is the equivalent isotropic radiated power
(EIRP). On the receiving side, no such measure has so far been introduced. Active antennas with down tilt
features, the received noise and noise, which is added at different locations in the signal path as well as varying
RF-front-end-architectures make it difficult to compare the sensitivity of different base station architectures.
Therefore a new measure will be introduced in this paper, the so-called equivalent isotropic sensitivity level
(EISL). This measure makes it possible to compare different types of base station architectures in terms of their
real sensitivity right at the air interface with respect to the system architecture and noise. Finally, EISL will be
used to compare different base station concepts and to show the influence of the antenna down tilt on the effective
usable sensitivity of a base station.

INTRODUCTION
The usual measure to describe the radiation of a base
station is the equivalent isotropic and loss less radiated
power EIRP. It equals the power that has to be fed into an
isotropic radiating transmit antenna to induce the same
field strength at the receiving location as the power radiated
by the referenced antenna. It therefore well describes the
performance of a basestation in downlink direction. This
value is not sufficient to describe the performance of a base
station in the uplink direction.
A measure similar to EIRP for the receiving performance
of a base station is therefore necessary. This measure will
be derived in this paper: it represents which sensitivity a
receiver, connected to an isotropic lossless antenna, has to
have to get the same SNR as connected to a real gain
antenna. The EISL will be derived with respect to the
antenna installation (feed-network, combiner, preamplifier
and cable).
Later EISL will be used to show the tremendous impact of
the antenna architecture on the receive performance of a
base station and how it is influenced by the antenna
temperature and down tilt.
Different RF architectures and the use of passive and active
antennas as well as the noise arising at different locations
of the receive path make it difficult to compare different
base station architectures to each other. By introducing a
measure like the equivalent isotropic ensitivity level
(EISL) this will be possible.
EISL
Reference plane
As a reference plane, where the EISL of a base station is
defined at, the air interface Al of the antenna is chosen, as
shown in figure 1. Traditionally the RF performance of a
base station and its antenna are described separately. The
top of cabinet reference plane (TOC) is often used as the
interface for the transmitter characterization, where all
parameters are referred to. Here it is proposed to shift the
reference plane for performance characterization from TOC
to Al as seen in figure 1, where AF reflects the antenna
feed.
Antenna
Base Station Cable
TOC AF Al
Figurel: Shift of reference plane from TOC to Al
Derivation of EISL
To derive the EISL, the commonly used figure of merit,
G/T is first looked at. This figure reflects the gain of the
used receiving equipment in ratio to its equivalent noise
temperature T as seen in eqn. (1).

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 G NiD
T rTAt+ (1- )To + (F-1)To
G
l7TA.t + (1- TI)To + (F - 1)To
D denotes the directivity of the antenna, r, is the
efficiency of the antenna without the feeder loss, G equals
the antenna gain, TA.t the effective antenna noise
temperature, To the reference ambient temperature and F
the noise figure of the RF receiver chain including the
feeder cable. Depending on the architecture, GIT ranges
from about -15dB/K to -9dB/K for typical base stations.
GIT of the receiving chain includes RF characteristics
only. Equalizer and decoder characteristics are typically
characterized separately by the bit error rate (BER) versus
ESymbol/Eo. From the required BER a required Esymbol/EO can
be derived, which leads to eqn. (2):
ESymbol (EISL / rSymbol )G
(2)
Eo req kTo
In eqn. (2) Esymbol is the energy per symbol, EO=kTO is the
noise floor, 'symbol
r is the symbol rate and EISL equals the
power a hypothetic receiver would have to receive if
connected to an ideal isotropic lossless antenna to meet the
required ESymbol/Eo. This definition follows the same
methodology as used for EIRP. Equation (2) is now
rearranged to eqn. (3), which represents the EISL:
EISL [ Esymbol -
E0 req
(G IT)dB [10 log(rk)
The resulting figure EISL acts as a metric, which merges
both the field of signal processing (characterized by
ESymbol/Eo) and RF (characterized by G/T).
Link budget calculations can be performed very easily
now: An uplink-connection is possible if:
EIRP(Mobile,dBm)-pathloss(dB)>EISL(Basestation,dBm),
respectively a downlink connection is possible if:
EIRP(Base Station,dBm)-pathloss(dB)>EISL(Mobile,dBm)-
Architecture Comparison
As an example for the different performances of various
architectures in terms of the receiver sensitivity, the
sensitivity values at Al of three GSM base station
architectures are compared:
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* Classic architecture with passive combiner in antenna
* Masthead LNA after passive combining
(1) * Active antenna elements before passive combining
The three architectures are shown in figure 2, their
parameters and the resulting EISL are given in table 1. The
values in table 1 are derived from typical base stations.
The following values are also used: TO=290K;
Esymbol /Eo=5dB (GSM), rSymbol=27OkHz (GSM).
Architecture GANT |1 F GREC EISL
Classic 15 dB | 0.92| 6.0 dB | 10 dB -124.2 dBm
masthead LNA 15 dB | 0.922 4.1 dB | 10 dB -126.5 dBm
active elements 115 dB I 0.921 1.9 dB I10 dB -129.7 dBm
GANT: Antenna Gain, GREC: Receiver Chain Gain, F: F of
antenna architecture.
Table 1: Comparison of base station architectures (receive)
l ~ ~ ~
a) clhassic a IN
<I
=ii- IA
(3) u *<
c) antenna w. active elements
1TOC ~Al
Figure 2: Base station architectures (receive)
Note the difference of up to 5.5 dB in EISL as seen in
table 1. In the following, EISL will be used to show the
influence of antenna down tilt on the link budget.
Antenna Noise and Down Tilt
In receiver systems with low noise figures (F < 2dB) the
influence of the effective antenna temperature TAnt is
significantly. This will be shown for a GSM 1800 base
station in the following. The BS antenna temperature TAnt
depends on the background brightness temperature TBright.
The background brightness temperature is a function of
elevation over horizon and season. The convolution of the
brightness temperature with the antenna gain pattern
 C(e, J) gives the effective antenna temperature, as seen in types, depending on the down tilt angle, which is shown
eqn. 5. To calculate TA,t, the closed form for the antenna in figure 6 for warm and cold ground.
pattern in eqn. (4a, 4b) is used [1].
350
8.5
300j ground temp: +27°C
C(Tm= Cos(W) (4a) ground temp: -13°C
250 .=
w_________-----
===.==.==...=====.===
.............==
== .=== ....=.======
-- --
.=== .....======.==_.

C(a) sin(23(e 90° 6))

200
.=p
- -
= (4b)
23(( - 900 - 6) = 150

0
100
r-
50
cold sky
w
0 330 30 0 I
_- *.I
0

-5
0 30 60 90 120 150 180
o
z
It Elevation angle / deg
,4 .- -10
60 Figure 4: Background brightness temperature at 1.8 GHz
-15
-20
V V' 300
-25

-30 90 Tground=300K (27°C)

250

Tground=260K (-1 3C)-

240 120 200

150
210 150

180

100
2 4 6 8 10
Figure 3: Base station antenna pattern Down-Tilt 8 / deg
( horizontal, ---- vertical)
Figure 5. Antenna noise temperature over down-tilt angle
Figure 3 shows the pattern corresponding to eqn. (4a) and
(4b) for a down tilt angle b = 7°. To calculate the antenna
-125
noise temperature, the background brightness temperature
profile in figure 4 is used [4], which shows the brightness -126

temperature at 1.8 GHz for warm (300K) and cold (270K) -127
ground. Figure 5 shows the results of eqn. (5) for the -128
antenna noise temperature TA.t with down-tilt angles b -129
ranging from 0 to 10 deg for warm and cold ground. -130
==To=-260K
F1.9dB
r 2r -131 -To=300K
f f TBright(E))8 C2(,T) sine dT de -132 -To=260K _ A=1.3dB i

TAnt ":
= T=

2j
(5) -133
j

j jf C2(e,) sine d'i de -134

O=owTo
Figure 5 shows a significant increase of the antenna noise
temperature TA.t with increased down-tilt, pointing the
main beam towards the warm ground. Looking now back
at eqn. (1) and eqn. (3), these antenna temperature curves
can now be used to derive EISL for the three base station
-135
2 4 6 10
Down Tilt b / deg
Figure 6: EISL over down tilt-angle
Figure 6 shows that for architectures with low noise
figure F of the receiving chain (here: 1.9 dB) the
equivalent isotropic sensitivity level EISL is reduced by
1.3 dB due to the 10° antenna down tilt. This is because of

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 raising the equivalent antenna noise temperature. The
reduction in EISL results in a degradation of the link
budget. So due to the antenna down tilt, the size of the cell
is reduced and, as a secondary effect, a further reduction in
cell size results from the degradation of the link budget.
This is shown in figure 7, which presents the change of
the cell size as a function of the change in link budget:
Ratiocellsize = 102(powerchange 2n) (6)
where n is the path loss exponent.
60
40 -::path loss exponent n 1.71:
,
...........=...=Z
== ..==. ==== = ==.== =..
CONCLUSION
The introduction of EISL as a measure for the effective
sensitivity present at the air interface of the base station
makes it easier to compare different receive architectures,
including those comprising adaptive array processing.
Often mechanical or electrical down tilt is pointed out as a
desirable feature for base station antennas to achieve a
flexible cell size. This is used to reduce the interference
between cells, but at the same time the downtilt leads to
degraded BS sensitivity. On the one hand the cell radius
shrinks with a down tilt of the antenna main beam,
therefore denser traffic can be handled in the cell. The
interference with neighbor cells is also reduced, but down
tilt enlarges the effective antenna noise temperature by
=

pointing the main beam from the cold horizon towards the
= =..= .=..==..
.......=.=.= = ==.==i= .==
.==.=....=

~. ....
warm floor. The warm floor raises the antenna noise
.. ...

... .. _.

temperature and by that the effective usable sensitivity at

-40 the air interface degrades.
I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ...

20I
- °' 2 - 0 1 2
reduction of 15%,. This.
over -----. ... ...n.........
points o
.._r ... t . REFERENCES
40 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~...... . i.. .. i... _|.
..

A decrease lof1.3dBonen sestvt eutn cell,-

a
sizeH.--.
_

0 s
O2
-3
W r. .;; il;;;; .hang.
II [1] M. Baldauf, A. Herschlein, W. Wiesbeck;
l; i buge .d;B;;;
l;;;;
enacmn of th BSsnitvt by frcin of a dB is Protective Distances in Mobile Communications;
,....,

Fiue 7 chng of cel siz ovr chng of Xlin bde Frequenz, No. 55, Nov./Dec. 2001, pp. 310-316
reuto of ove r. Thi pont ou tha .an .".
[2] Fischer G., Manzione L, Tsai M-J:
.M

Single Element Antenna structure with high isolation,

US patent 6288679, 11. Sept 2001
[3] Fischer G., Manzione L, Tsai M-J:
Antenna structure for electromagnetic structures,
pointless due to the much higher impact of down tilt, European Patent, EP 0130336.0-1248, 9. April 2001
antenna architecture and seasonal temperature changes.
[4] Zinke, Brunswig:
High Frequency Techniques 2, 4th Edition, p. 228,
Springer, Berlin - Heidelberg - New York,

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