Experimental Demonstration of a Software-Defined-Radio Adaptive Beamformer

Digital beamforming (DBF) is the platform for smart antenna technology. Adaptive algorithms coupled with these arrays enable automatic rejection of interference and can maximize the communication throughput in any dynamic environment. Hardware implementation is very costly. Here we propose an implementation of DBF arrays using software defined radios (SDRs). The SDR platform is a versatile, low cost solution to DBF and at the same time provides a practical testbed for rapid testing of different beamforming algorithms. We present experimental results for DBF using the particle swarm optimization search algorithm and a four-element SDR array and demonstrate the adaptive capabilities of this proposed technology.