Smart Antennas Technology

Mohamed M. Omar
 Definition
• A smart antenna system combines multiple antenna
elements with a signal processing capability to
optimize its radiation and/or reception pattern
automatically in response to the signal
environment. Or
• It is the digital signal processing capability, along
with the antennas, which make the system smart.
• It is used for wireless communications.
 NEED FOR SMART ANTENNAS
• Wireless communication systems pose some unique challenges:
i. the limited allocated spectrum results in a limit on capacity.
ii. the radio propagation environment and the mobility of users
give rise to signal fading and spreading in time, space and frequency.
iii. the limited battery life at the mobile device poses power
constraints.
• In addition, cellular wireless communication systems have to cope with
interference due to frequency reuse.
• Research efforts investigating effective technologies to mitigate such
effects have been going on for the past twenty five years, as wireless
communications are experiencing rapid growth.
• Among these methods are multiple access schemes, channel coding
and equalization and smart antenna employment.
 Wireless Systems Impairments
The wireless communication systems are limited in performance and capacity by:

Co-Chanel
Interference

Limited
Spectrum
• An antenna in a telecommunications system is the port
through which radio frequency (RF) energy is coupled from
the transmitter to the outside world for transmission
purposes, and in reverse, to the receiver from the outside
world for reception purposes.
• To date, antennas have been the most neglected of all the
components in personal communications systems. Yet, the
manner in which radio frequency energy is distributed into
and collected from space has a profound influence upon
the efficient use of spectrum, the cost of establishing new
personal communications networks and the service quality
provided by those networks.
• The commercial adoption of smart antenna techniques is a
great promise to the solution of the aforementioned
wireless communications’ impairments.
 A Useful Analogy for Adaptive Smart
Antennas
• For an intuitive grasp of how an adaptive antenna system works, close
your eyes and converse with someone as they move about the room.
You will notice that you can determine their location without seeing
them because of the following:
• i. You hear the speaker's signals through your two ears, your acoustic
sensors.
• ii. The voice arrives at each ear at a different time.
• iii. Your brain, a specialized signal processor, does a large number of
calculations to correlate information and compute the location of
the speaker.
• Your brain also adds the strength of the signals from each ear together,
so you perceive sound in one chosen direction as being twice as loud as
everything else.
• Adaptive antenna systems do the same thing,
using antennas instead of ears.
• Going a step further, if additional speakers
joined in, your internal signal processor could
also tune out unwanted noise (interference)
and alternately focus on one conversation at a
time. Thus, advanced adaptive array systems
have a similar ability to differentiate between
desired and undesired signals.
 Antennas and Antenna Systems
• Antennas
Radio antennas couple electromagnetic energy from one
medium (space) to another (e.g., wire, coaxial cable, or
waveguide). Physical designs can vary greatly.
A) Isotropic Radiators
An isotropic radiator is one which radiates its energy
equally in all directions. Even though such elements are
not physically realizable, they are often used as references
to compare to them the radiation characteristics of actual
antennas.
B) Omnidirectional Antennas
Omnidirectional antennas are radiators having essentially an isotropic pattern in a given plane
(the azimuth plane) and directional in an orthogonal plane (the elevation plane).
Omnidirectional antennas are adequate for simple RF environments where no specific
knowledge of the users directions is either available or needed. However, this unfocused
approach scatters signals, reaching desired users with only a small percentage of the overall
energy sent out into the environment. Thus, there is a waste of resources using
omnidirectional
antennas since the vast majority of transmitted signal power radiates in directions other
than the desired user.
Given this limitation, omnidirectional strategies attempt to overcome environmental
challenges by simply increasing the broadcasting power. Also, in a setting of numerous
users (and interferers), this makes a bad situation worse in that the signals that miss the
intended user become interference for those in the same or adjoining cells.
Moreover, the single-element approach cannot selectively reject signals interfering with those
of served users. Therefore, it has no spatial multipath mitigation or equalization
capabilities.
Omnidirectional strategies directly and adversely impact spectral efficiency, limiting frequency
reuse.
• These limitations of broadcast antenna technology
regarding the quality, capacity, and geographic
coverage of wireless systems initiated an evolution
in the fundamental design and role of the antenna
in a wireless system.
C) Directional Antennas
Unlike an omnidirectional antenna, where the power is radiated equally in all
directions in the horizontal (azimuth) plane, a directional antenna concentrates
the power primarily in certain directions or angular regions.
The radiating properties of these antennas are described by a radiation pattern,
which is a plot of the radiated energy from the antenna measured at various
angles at a constant radial distance from the antenna.
The direction in which the intensity/gain of these antennas is maximum is referred
to as the boresight direction. The gain of directional antennas in the boresight
direction is usually much greater than that of isotropic and/or omnidirectional
antennas.
The radiation pattern of a directional antenna is shown in Figure where the
boresight is in the direction θ = 0◦. The plot consists of a main lobe (also referred
to as major lobe), which contains the boresight and several minor lobes including
side and rear lobes. Between these lobes are directions in which little or no
radiation occurs. These are termed minima or nulls. Ideally, the intensity of the
field toward nulls should be zero (minus infinite dBs ). However, practically nulls
may represent a 30 or more dB reduction from the power at boresight. The
angular segment subtended by two points where the power is one-half the main
lobe’s peak value is known as the half-power beamwidth.
D) Phased Array Antennas
• A phased array antenna uses an array of single elements
and combines the signal induced on each element to form
the array output. The direction where the maximum gain
occurs is usually controlled by adjusting properly the
amplitude and phase between the different elements.
E) Adaptive Arrays
• The radiation characteristics of these arrays are adaptively changing according to changes
and requirements of the radiation environment.
• Adaptive arrays provide significant advantages over conventional arrays:
• providing flexible, rapidly configurable, beamforming and null-steering patterns.
• An adaptive antenna array is the one that continuously adjusts its own pattern by means
of feedback control.
• The principal purpose of an adaptive array sensor system is to enhance the
detection and reception of certain desired signals. The pattern of the array can be steered
toward a desired direction space by applying phase weighting across the array and can be
shaped by amplitude and phase weighting the outputs of the array elements.
• Additionally, adaptive arrays sense the interference sources from the environment and
suppress them automatically, improving the performance of communication system. In
comparison with conventional arrays, adaptive arrays are usually more versatile and
reliable.
• Adaptive antenna arrays are commonly equipped with signal processors which can
automatically adjust by a simple adaptive technique the variable antenna weights of a
signal processor so as to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio.
• At the receiver output, the desired signal along with interference and noise are received
at the same time. The adaptive antenna scans its radiation pattern until it is fixed to the
optimum direction (toward which the signal-to-noise ratio is maximized). In this direction
the maximum of the pattern is ideally toward the desired signal.
 Antenna Systems
• How can an antenna be made more intelligent?
• First, its physical design can be modified by adding more
elements.
• Second, the antenna can become an antenna system that can
be designed to shift signals before transmission at each of the
successive elements so that the antenna has a composite
effect.
• This basic hardware and software concept is known as the
phased array antenna.
• The following summarizes antenna developments in order of
increasing benefits and intelligence:
 A) Sectorized Systems
Sectorized antenna systems take a traditional cellular area and subdivide it into
sectors that are covered using directional antennas looking out from the same
base station location. Operationally, each sector is treated as a different cell, the
range of which is greater than in the omnidirectional case. Sector antennas
increase the possible reuse of a frequency channel in such cellular systems by
reducing potential interference across the original cell, and they are widely used
for this purpose.
 B) Diversity Systems
• In the next step toward smart antennas, the diversity system incorporates two
antenna elements at the base station, the slight physical separation (space
diversity) of which has been used historically to improve reception by
counteracting the negative effects of multipath.
• Diversity offers an improvement in the effective strength of the received signal by
using one of the following two methods:
• i. switched diversity_Assuming that at least one antenna will be in a favorable
location at a given moment, this system continually switches between antennas
(connects each of the receiving channels to the best serving antenna) so as always
to use the element with the largest output. While reducing the negative effects of
signal fading, they do not increase gain since only one antenna is used at a time.
• ii. diversity combining_This approach corrects the phase error in two
multipath signals and effectively combines the power of both signals to produce
gain. Other diversity systems, such as maximal ratio combining systems, combine
the outputs of all the antennas to maximize the ratio of combined received signal
energy to noise.
 C) Smart
The concept of using multiple antennas and innovative signal processing
to serve
cells more intelligently has existed for many years.
In fact, varying degrees of relatively costly smart antenna systems have
already been applied in defense systems.
Until recent years, cost barriers have prevented their use in commercial
systems.
The advent of powerful low-cost digital signal processors (DSPs),
general-purpose processors, as well as innovative software-based signal-
processing techniques (algorithms) have made intelligent antennas
practical for cellular communications systems.
Today, when spectrally efficient solutions are increasingly a business
imperative, these systems are providing greater coverage area for each
cell site, higher rejection of interference, and substantial capacity
improvements.