In a wireless communication networks, there are communication nodes, for example base stations, where base station products are provided by different suppliers. Today there is typically one base station product per frequency band. In the future the number of frequency bands is expected to grow rapidly, which would require a lot of different base station products supported by each supplier. Each base station product is expensive to develop and to service, which will make it very costly to have a plurality of different base station products.
One way for reducing the number of base station products is to design multiband base stations, which means that one base station product could be used for many different frequency bands. One essential part of a multiband base station is multiband filters, which is used to filter the signals before they are transmitted/received. However, multiband filters can only be designed for relatively low signal power levels, which makes it difficult to use them for transmission in macro and micro base stations.
In base stations, there is usually one filter per transmitter radio arrangement, where a transmitter radio arrangement comprises one or more power amplifiers. By increasing the number of transmitter radios arrangements, it is possible to reduce the output power per radio and hence the power going through the corresponding filters. With large enough number of transmitter radio arrangements, it is then possible to reduce the power per filter such that multiband filters are enabled. However, such an arrangement would be rather costly due to the larger number of transmitter radio arrangements.
There is thus a need for a multi-band communication node where the number of transmitter radio arrangements is not increased compared to a single-band communication node.