Simulation of Adaptive Antennas in a Spread Spectrum Communications Environment

At high data rates, the advantages of spread spectrum techniques for protection against interference are reduced; however, adaptive antennas can be used to improve performance by placing nulls in the direction of the interference. Unfortunately, the design of adaptive antennas is complicated by the wide bandwidths required for spread spectrum systems. This paper describes two software tools, AAP and SYSTID, for analyzing adaptive arrays that greatly simplify the design process. AAP can be used to generate steady-state performance. The SYSTID simulation can be used to investigate transient effects including, component nonlinearities and frequency dependencies. Two simulation examples are presented to demonstrate the versatility of the software.