I am working on a 5G phased array antenna design. Typically, how many radiating elements will be need for base station antenna design?
Release 8 LTE supports 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO schemes. In 5G/NR the order of MIMO can be 64 x 64, i.e. 64 transmitters. The 5G/NR supports a large number of elements (e.g 128 elements, as per Table 10.1 in https://www.5gamericas.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/5G-Americas_Advanced-Antenna-Systems-for-5G-White-Paper.pdf ), yet the application will define how many elements may be needed (it is not necessary to have so many elements in all installations). Sometimes, e.g. for rural applications, 2x1 (2 transmitters) or 4x1 (4 transmitters) may be more than adequate.
See also
https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/white-papers/advanced-antenna-systems-for-5g-networks , https://www.keysight.com/upload/cmc_upload/All/Understanding_the_5G_NR_Physical_Layer.pdf ,
and
http://ctw2018.ieee-ctw.org/files/2018/05/5G-NR-CTW-final.pdf
The number of elements in the array affects the gain and beamwidth. Thus it depends the the application. When MIMO system is used, the number of antennas N x M will be decided upon the required benefits from the MIMO system. Here each of the antennas can have a certain number of elements.
The number of elements is the same as the number of nulls you can generate so that you can use beamshape to increase the number of phones you can cope with in the reception volume.
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