A certain investigations on the performance issues of smart antennas for cellular mobile communications

Abstract

Adaptive antenna arrays are being developed to cope with the high capacity requirement of the 3G/4G wireless cellular communications systems. As adaptive antenna arrays focus narrow high gain beams towards the desired users and nulls towards the unwanted interferers, both coverage and capacity of the network can be improved. Radiation pattern of the array antennas depends on Geometric configurations, relative displacement between array elements, excitation amplitude and phase of individual elements and relative pattern of individual elements. The capacity of a Wireless network depends on the size of the antenna array, the beam pattern used and the speed with which the beam-former and Direction of Arrival estimator. The development of adaptive antenna includes the design of array antenna and optimizing the array antenna parameters such as directivity and half power beamwidth. We aimed to develop new array configurations with narrow beam pattern and to propose a suitable array configuration for capacity improvement in cellular mobile networks. In this paper, as an initial work, we have analyzed various types of existing primary array configurations such as linear, planar and circular arrays of isotropic sensors using array factor approach with the beamsteering capabilities using MATLAB simulations. From the simulation results it is clear that the circular and concentric circular arrays outperforms than other configurations.