July 14, 2018
Growing Your Microwave Capacity
Making Sense of the Options to Determine What’s Best for You
Microwave technology is evolving rapidly to meet the ever increasing demands for data throughput.
The recent data explosion has created a burden on communications networks to provide the necessary capacities to support the network and its applications. Networks that were initially deployed to carry low capacity voice circuits are now faced with the challenges of being increasingly adaptive, elastic and intelligent to accommodate the constantly evolving traffic it carries. These networks are going through massive transformations for new applications and critical data and while many of these networks have been around for years and have been adequately handling traffic demands, new services are pushing the demand for capacity
Fortunately, recent technological advances and regulatory changes have made high capacity transport more practical and achievable. We have written a paper to explore newer options for designing high capacity microwave links and the key benefits, differences and issues associated with each. We analyze the use of high modulation levels, the use of wide channels and their respective outcomes and compare which option offers the best solution to achieve the capacity while still maintaining the performance and reliability targets of the network. In order to properly analyze the principal contribution of each of these options, we will use one of the most common formulas and theorems developed by famed engineer and physicist, Harry Nyquist. His theorem will give us a foundation of comparison for each of the variables along with the tradeoffs each offers.
This paper will make recommendations for all different scenarios… Without giving too much away, using wider channels where possible represents the lowest cost, most feasible approach to growing capacity – especially when increasing capacity on existing deployed microwave links.
Download the paper for solution recommendations for your network.