Link Budgets: How Much Energy is Really Received
Aarne Mämmelä, Adrian Kotelba, Marko Höyhtyä, Paul V Desmond · InTech eBooks · 2011
In this chapter we consider various factors affecting link power or energy budgets, which are introduced in some detail for mobile and satellite communications in (Saunders, 1999, pp.97-99; Sklar, 2001, pp.242-303).We use the link budget as presented in (Saunders, 1999) for mobile cellular systems as a starting point.Some loss factors may be random.If we do not know the distributions of those random variables, it is reasonable to use the worst case analysis (French, 1986, p. 36), which is useful but in general highly pessimistic.We discuss the alternatives based on decision theory.In some cases it is reasonable to compute link budgets for the average performance instead of worst case performance.We can also use outage probabilities in the worst case analysis.The goal of a link budget is to estimate the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per bit at the input of the combiner/equalizer in the receiver (Saunders, 1999;Sklar, 2001), as in Fig. 1.Normally the combiner/equalizer includes some kind of correlator, which tries to use the received signal in the best possible way (Proakis, 2001).It has been known at least since the mid-1960's that the transmitter power or energy is a basic system resource (Lucky et al., 1968, pp.51-58; Schwartz et al., 1966, pp.555-558).The different loss factors are assumed to be multiplicative in the linear domain and additive in the logarithmic domain, i.e., in decibels.In addition, the additive noise level is estimated by measuring the receiver noise floor and certain link margins are added.Most of the additive noise actually arises in the receiver front end.If there are several antennas, the sum of the powers is used.With a comprehensive link budget the necessary design trade-offs can be made in a systematic way before the system is actually built.Link budgets do not include phenomena in or preceding the power amplifier, for example its finite efficiency.We do not discuss transmitter and receiver power budgets, i.e., how much energy or power is actually taken from the battery or electricity network.There are also other link budgets such as delay budgets that we do not consider.Many loss factors depend on the frequency range (Saunders, 1999;Chu & Greenstein, 1999).The wavelength is λ = c/f where c is the propagation velocity of the radio waves and f is the frequency.Radio frequencies range from 3 kHz to 300 GHz with wavelengths from 100 km down to 1 mm.The use of frequencies below 3 kHz is in general impractical and above 300 www.intechopen.comVehicular Technologies: Increasing Connectivity 434 GHz we have infrared frequencies.In many modern mobile communication systems the frequencies employed are between 1 GHz and 10 GHz, and the wavelengths are then between 30 cm and 3 cm.We will assume that the antennas are used only in the far field, which implies that the dimensions of all antennas are small compared to the distance between transmitter and receiver antennas.Thus we will not consider any evanescent or near field effects. PrecoderCombiner/ equalizer Link budget