Smart antenna systems for wireless applications

A smart antenna approach employing digital beamforming is designed and developed for several wireless applications, including the cellular PCS band (1850 MHz to 1990 MHz), cellular GSM band (1700 MHz to 1900 MHz), and the IEEE 802.11b WLAN (2400 MHz to 2500 MHz). The smart antenna concept is an 8-channel receiver system with an 8-element linear antenna array. Each channel is digitized either at RF, IF, or baseband and processed in real-time using an FPGA. Applications of interest include direction finding and cochannel interference mitigation. The paper addresses several smart antenna architectures for digital beamforming and applies each approach to the PCS, GSM, and WLAN applications.