A high-speed adaptive antenna array with simultaneous multibeam-forming capability

A new type of adaptive beamforming antenna system architecture is proposed for multichannel wireless communications. Multibeam communication with high data throughput is accomplished using the proposed beamformer architecture. The system consists of analog mixers, a multitone direct digital synthesizer (DDS), and a digital signal processor (DSP) controller. The essential idea of multibeam forming is based on a multitone weighting scheme combined with analog-digital hybrid signal processing. While the real-time multibeam construction is realized by the analog mixer circuits and a DDS, the complicated adaptive beamforming and direction-of-arrival estimation algorithms are carried out by the DSP. In this architecture, only one beamformer circuit is required to handle multiple beams, leading to significant reduction in hardware counts. A 5.8-GHz eight-element adaptive beamforming array successfully demonstrates two-beam simultaneous beamforming with less than three degrees of peak and null steering errors and more than 20-dB interference suppression. The test-bed exhibits successful two-channel data recovery at 25-Mb/s data throughput in each channel with binary phase-shift keying modulation, for simultaneous dual-beam reception. The bit-error-rate measurement validates the robustness of the communication quality under strong interferences.