Low-cost digital adaptive antenna architecture combined with low-sidelobe beam synthesis

Abstract

The explosion of growth seen in the past decade in the mobile telephony market has meant that the electronic components used in the manufacture of mobile terminals are now mass produced, with a commensurate fall in unit cost. By exploiting the functionality of such components in phased array antenna design a truly low-cost phased array antenna can be realised. An array antenna architecture is presented that exploits low-cost component technologies. A low-cost architecture for enabling an adaptive, or smart, capability is developed. By separation of the beamforming function and spatial adaptive processing function into two separate signal paths an undersampling technique can be used to provide low-cost spatial processing. The performance of an adaptive processing algorithm is investigated for a radar application. Simulations applied to array element patterns measured on a 16-element linear array demonstrate the performance of the antenna in sidelobe suppression and interference cancellation/spatial filtering. A penalty function approach for sidelobe suppression is applied and is shown to enable flexibility between adaptive cancellation of interference and overall sidelobe level.