Design of an adaptive antenna array for tracking the source of maximum power and its application to CDMA mobile communications

This paper presents an alternative method of adaptive beamforming. Under an assumption that the desired signal is large enough compared to each of interfering signals at the receiver, which is preconditionally achieved in code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile communications by the chip correlator, the proposed technique provides for a suboptimal beam pattern that increases the signal-to-noise/signal-to-interference ratio (SNR/SIR) and eventually increases the capacity of the communication channel. The main advantages of the new technique are: (1) the procedure requires neither reference signals nor a training period; (2) the signal intercoherency does not affect the performance or complexity of the entire procedure; and (3) the total amount of computation is tremendously reduced compared to that of most conventional beamforming techniques such that the suboptimal beam pattern is produced at every snapshot on a real-time basis. In fact, the total computational load for generating a new set of weights including the update of an N-by-N autocovariance matrix is O(3N/sup 2/+12N). It can further be reduced down to O(11N) by approximating the matrix with the instantaneous signal vector.