A novel smart antenna system implementation for broad-band wireless communications

A novel design of smart antenna system with adaptive beamforming capability is introduced for broad-band wireless communication. To achieve high data throughput of the multi-antenna system, a parallel analog-digital (A/D) signal processing scheme is proposed. The essential idea is to realize the real-time beamforming using heterodyne RF and IF circuitry. The bottleneck of digital signal processor (DSP) I/O and processing speed is thus relieved, while the advanced signal processing capability of the DSP chip is utilized. Based on this idea, a 5.8 GHz smart antenna receiver is implemented. Various experiments are carried out to examine the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, beam synthesis, and bit error rate (BER) performances of the system. A 20-Mb/s data throughput using binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation is demonstrated for this eight-element adaptive array.