Compact dual-band frequency agile antenna designed for carrier aggregation LTE small cell

This paper deals with a highly integrated frequency agile antenna design optimized for a specific LTE small cell base station using Carrier Aggregation (CA) technique for network capacity improvement. A novel compact dual access LTE antenna system is proposed combining a LTE band 7 antenna and a LTE band 20 antenna. This antenna system is composed of a regular microstrip patch antenna for LTE band 7 and a more complex dual band frequency agile folded microstrip patch antenna for LTE band 20. Available CA modes have driven the antenna design towards the frequency agile volume optimized antenna solution presented in this work. It only covers the required instantaneous bandwidth while standard static antennas would require a wider bandwidth and therefore a larger volume to be compatible with all CA modes.