SMART ANTENNA TECHNOLOGYBEAMFORMING

SMART ANTENNAS Introduction:

There is an ever-increasing demand on mobile wireless operators to provide voice and high-speed data services. At the same time, these operators want to support more users per base station to reduce overall network costs and make the services affordable to subscribers. As a result, wireless systems that enable higher data rates and higher capacities are a pressing need. Unfortunately, because the available broadcast spectrum is limited, attempts to increase traffic within a fixed bandwidth create more interference in the system and degrade the signal quality. In particular, when omni-directional antennas are used at the base station, the transmission/reception of each users signal becomes a source of interference to other users located in the same cell, making the overall system interference limited. An effective way to reduce this type of interference is to split up the cell into multiple sectors and use sectorized antennas.

Figure 1: Non-Smart Antennas System Smart antenna technology offers a significantly improved solution to reduce interference levels and improve the system capacity. With this technology, each users signal is transmitted and received by the base station only in the direction of that particular user. This drastically reduces the overall interference in the system. A smart antenna system, as shown in Figure 2, consists of an array of antennas that together direct different transmission/reception beams toward each user in the system. This method of transmission and reception is called beamforming and is made possible through smart (advanced) signal processing at the baseband.

Figure 2: Smart Antenna SystemBeamforming

Definition:
Smart antennas (also known as adaptive array antennas, multiple antennas and recently MIMO) are antenna arrays with smart signal processing algorithms used to identify spatial signal signature such as the direction of arrival (DOA) of the signal, and use it to calculate beamforming vectors, to track and locate the antenna beam on the mobile/target. The antenna could optionally be any sensor.

Applications:
Smart antenna techniques are used notably in acoustic signal processing, track and scan RADAR, radio astronomy and radio telescopes, and mostly in cellular systems like WCDMA and UMTS.

Types:
Two of the main types of smart antennas include: switched beam smart antennas and adaptive array smart antennas. Switched beam systems have several available fixed beam patterns. A decision is made as to which beam to access, at any given point in time, based upon the requirements of the system. Adaptive arrays allow the antenna to steer the beam to any direction of interest while simultaneously nulling interfering signals. Beam direction can be estimated using the socalled direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods.

Functions:
Smart antennas have two main functions: DOA estimation and Beamforming.

1) Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation

The smart antenna system estimates the direction of arrival of the signal, using varios techniques such as Matrix Pencil method. They involve finding a spatial spectrum of the antenna/sensor array, and calculating the DOA from the peaks of this spectrum. These calculations are computationally intensive. Matrix Pencil is very efficient in case of real time systems, and under the correlated sources.

2) Beamforming
Beamforming is spatial filtering, a means of transmitting or receiving sound preferentially in some directions over others. Beamforming is exactly analogous to frequency domain analysis of time signals. In time/frequency filtering, the frequency content of a time signal is revealed by its Fourier transform. In beamforming, the angular (directional) spectrum of a signal is revealed by Fourier analysis of the way sound excites different parts of the set of transducers. Beamforming is the method used to create the radiation pattern of the antenna array by adding constructively the phases of the signals in the direction of the targets/mobiles desired, and nulling the pattern of the targets/mobiles that are undesired/interfering targets. This can be done with a simple FIR tapped delay line filter. The weights of the FIR filter may also be changed adaptively, and used to provide optimal beamforming. In beamforming, each users signal is multiplied with complex weights that adjust the magnitude and phase of the signal to and from each antenna. This causes the output from the array of antennas to form a transmit/receive beam in the desired direction and minimizes the output in other directions.

If the complex weights are selected from a library of weights that form beams in specific, predetermined directions, the process is called switched beamforming. Here, the basestation basically switches between the different beams based on the received signal strength measurements. On the other hand, if the weights are computed and adaptively updated in real time, the process is called adaptive beamforming. Through adaptive beamforming, the basestation can form narrower beams towards the desired user and nulls towards interfering users, considerably improving the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. Beamforming Requirements: Directivity A beamformer is a spatial filter and can be used to increase the signal-to-noise ratio by blocking most of the noise outside the directions of interest. Side lobe control No filter is ideal. Must balance main lobe directivity and side lobe levels, which are related. Beam steering A beamformer can be electronically steered, with some degradation in performance. Beamformer pattern function is frequency dependent: Main lobe narrows with increasing frequency.

MIMO Extension of smart antennas:

Conventionally, a smart antenna is a unit of a wireless communication system and performs spatial signal processing with multiple antennas. Multiple antennas can be used at either the transmitter or receiver. Recently, the technology has been extended to use the multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver; such a system is called a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. As extended Smart Antenna technology, MIMO supports spatial information processing. Spatial information processing includes spatial information coding such as Spatial multiplexing and Diversity Coding, as well as beamforming. MIMO technology has attracted attention in wireless communications, because it offers significant increases in data throughput and link range without additional bandwidth or transmit power. It achieves this by higher spectral efficiency (more bits per second per hertz of bandwidth) and link reliability or diversity (reduced fading). Because of these properties, MIMO is an important part of modern wireless communication standards such as IEEE 802.11n (Wifi) and 4G.

Functions of MIMO:
MIMO can be sub-divided into three main categories: precoding, spatial multiplexing or SM, and diversity coding. 1) Precoding is multi-stream beamforming, in the narrowest definition. In more general terms, it is considered to be all spatial processing that occurs at the transmitter. In (single-layer) beamforming, the same signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with appropriate phase (and sometimes gain) weighting such that the signal power is maximized at the receiver input. The benefits of beamforming are to increase the received signal gain, by making signals emitted from different antennas add up constructively, and to reduce the multipath fading effect. In the absence of scattering, beamforming results in a well defined directional pattern, but in typical cellular conventional beams are not a good analogy. When the receiver has multiple antennas, the transmit beamforming cannot simultaneously maximize the signal level at all of the receive antennas, and precoding with multiple streams is used.

2) Spatial multiplexing requires MIMO antenna configuration. In spatial multiplexing, a high rate signal is split into multiple lower rate streams and each stream is transmitted from a different transmit antenna in the same frequency channel. If these signals arrive at the receiver antenna array with sufficiently different spatial signatures, the receiver can separate these streams into (almost) parallel channels. Spatial multiplexing is a very powerful technique for increasing channel capacity at higher signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The maximum number of spatial streams is limited by the lesser in the number of antennas at the transmitter or receiver. Spatial multiplexing can be used with or without transmit channel knowledge. Spatial multiplexing can also be used for simultaneous transmission to multiple receivers, known as space-division multiple access 3) Diversity Coding techniques are used when there is no channel knowledge at the transmitter. In diversity methods, a single stream (unlike multiple streams in spatial multiplexing) is transmitted, but the signal is coded using techniques called space-time coding. The signal is emitted from each of the transmit antennas with full or near orthogonal coding. Diversity coding exploits the independent fading in the multiple antenna links to enhance signal diversity. Because there is no channel knowledge, there is no beamforming or array gain from diversity coding.

Antenna diversity for MIMO:

Diversity Coding is the spatial coding techniques for a MIMO system in wireless channels. Wireless channels severely suffer from fading phenomena, which causes unreliability in data decoding. Fundamentally, diversity coding sends multiple copies through multiple transmit antennas, so as to improve the reliability of the data reception. If one of them fails to receive, the others are used for data decoding.

ANTENNA DIVERSITY
Also known as space diversity, it is any one of several wireless diversity schemes that use two or more antennas to improve the quality and reliability of a wireless link. Often, especially in urban and indoor environments, there is no clear line-of-sight (LOS) between transmitter and receiver. Instead the signal is reflected along multiple paths before finally being received. Each of these bounces can introduce phase shifts, time delays, attenuations, and distortions that can destructively interfere with one another at the aperture of the receiving antenna. Antenna diversity is especially effective at mitigating these multipath situations. This is because multiple antennas offer a receiver several observations of the same signal. Each antenna will experience a different interference environment. Thus, if one antenna is experiencing a deep fade, it is likely that another has a sufficient signal. Collectively such a system can provide a robust link. The use of diversity techniques at both ends of the link is termed spacetime coding. A practical application of diversity reception is in mobile phone towers - each face of a tower often has three antennas; one is transmitting, while the other two perform diversity reception. Inherently an antenna diversity scheme requires additional hardware and integration versus a single antenna system but due to the commonality of the signal paths a fair amount of circuitry can be shared. Also with the multiple signals there is a greater processing demand placed on the receiver, which can lead to tighter design requirements. Typically, however, signal reliability is paramount and using multiple antennas is an effective way to decrease the number of drop-outs and lost connections.

Types:
Few of the types of antenna diversity are: Spatial Diversity Spatial diversity employs multiple antennas, usually with the same characteristics, that are physically separated from one another. Depending upon the expected incidence of the incoming signal, sometimes a space on the order of a wavelength is sufficient. Other times much larger distances are needed. Cellularization or sectorization, for example, is a spatial diversity scheme that can have antennas or base stations miles apart. This is especially beneficial for the mobile communication industry since it allows multiple users to share a limited communication spectrum and avoid co-channel interference. Time Diversity It is used in digital communication systems to combat that the transmissions channel may suffer from error bursts due to time-varying channel conditions. The error bursts may be caused by fading in combination with a moving receiver, transmitter or obstacle, or by intermittent electromagnetic interference, for example from crosstalk in a cable.. Time diversity implies that the same data is transmitted multiple times, or a redundant error correcting code is added.