Design of digital prototype of adaptive antenna receiver

A smart/adaptive antenna is a system in which the performance of the antenna pattern can be improved. This is done by multiple antennas, which are processed simultaneously. Dynamic changing of the antenna pattern enables the system to form a beam at a target, and with that improvement of its signal to noise ratio. The beam can also be formed to remove interference from certain directions. What is possible with these systems and how well do the beamforming smart antennas perform in a real system? When using a real system, the components are not ideal and in the system design trade-offs are made to find a good working system. It is not about finding the 'best' system, but finding the best system under certain circumstances or constraints. A way to reveal these design parameters and gain insight into the actual system can be done by implementing a test-bed. The test-bed is a set up where the various algorithms can be tested in a real system. This paper aims to design and develop an adaptive antenna receiver to serve as a common reference for testing adaptive antenna arrays and signal combining algorithms, as well as complete systems. The emphasis is laid on ease of implementation in a multichannel/multiuser environment. A flexible suite of offline processing software should be written to perform system calibration, test-bed initialization, data acquisition control, data storage/transfer, offline signal processing and analysis and graph plotting.