Advanced Communication Smart Antennas

Demand for mobile data service has never been so high, resulting in the development of enabling technologies from GPRS (2.5G), WCDMA (3G), and CDMA2000 evolution data optimized (EVDO) services to the systems beyond third generation (3G), Convergence and competition on the way toward 4G. With evolving technologies, the wireless communication device has become a customizable mobile mini personal computer (PC), which combines all various communication options. However, data rate performance depends on signal quality of the wireless radio link, which suffers from severe multipath propagation particularly in urban environments. Mitigating multipath fading of received signals is of primary importance in wireless communication systems. Using Smart antenna systems (SAS) is the well known techniques for combating fading. The radio waves are greatly affected by the ground terrain, the atmosphere, and the objects in their path, like buildings, hills, trees, etc. These physical phenomena, termed fading. The term smart antenna generally refers to any antenna arrays with a sophisticated and smart signal processing algorithm used to adjust or adapt its own beam pattern in order to emphasize the level of signals of interest but minimize the interfering signals level. This fading causes time-delay spread and Doppler spread after signal demodulation. To consider the effects of fading, the slow-flat Rayleigh channel is used to stochastically characterize system performance in most cases. The use of SASs has been proven effective in combating fading due to environments and co-channel interference caused by adjacent base stations [1]. The algorithms in Smart Antenna Systems (SAS) used to identify spatial signal signature such as the direction of arrival (DOA) of the signal, and use it to calculate beam forming vectors, to track and locate the antenna beam on the mobile/target. Two of the main types of smart antennas include switched beam smart antennas and adaptive array smart antennas. Switched beam systems have several available fixed beam patterns. A decision is made as to which beam to access, at any given point in time, based upon the requirements of the system. Adaptive arrays allow the antenna to steer the beam to any direction of interest while simultaneously nulling interfering

signals [2]. Smart antenna techniques are used notably in acoustic signal processing, track and scan RADAR, radio astronomy and radio telescopes, and mostly in cellular like W-CDMA and UMTS. Conventionally, a smart antenna is a unit of a wireless communication system and performs spatial signal processing with multiple antennas. Multiple antennas can be used at either the transmitter or receiver. Recently, the technology has been extended to use the multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver; such a system is called a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. References: 1] Smart Antennas for Advanced Communication Systems, Dau-Chyrh Chang, IEEE, 2011 2] en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna