DOA-based adaptive array antenna testbed system

Abstract

At a cellular radio base station, adaptive array antenna technology, exploiting spatial domain filtering with antenna array and digital signal processing, can combat cochannel interference (CCI), thus the system capacity can be increased. Adaptive array antenna algorithms usually need, in advance, the directions of arrival (DOAs) of the desired and interferer signals. DOA-based adaptive array antenna systems make use of the estimated DOAs in a beamformer in order to separate the desired and interferer signals spatially. The paper presents a real hardware base station testbed system for DOA-based adaptive array antennas. This system includes a transmitting part for the downlink and a receiving one for the uplink. Efficient beamforming, based on the estimated incident signals' DOAs, separates only the signal of interest from the CCI. To estimate DOAs, we chose the unitary MUSIC (multiple signal classification) algorithm.