Virtual antenna array theory based on high speed mobile communications

Abstract

For a high speed mobile communication system, Doppler shift affects its performance seriously. In the future, broad band communication based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing which depends on the orthogonality among sub-carriers will become popular. The absence of the orthogonality due to being destroyed by Doppler shift, leads to the failure of signal demodulation. So Doppler shift must be estimated and compensated for, which is the main purpose of previous work. On the other hand, many applications have shown that Doppler shift can be utilized to acquire the direction and speed or improve the quality of a signal. In this paper, we propose a method of not only estimating and compensating for Doppler shift, but also generating multiple non-frequency shifted signals, which can be regarded as the output of a virtual antenna array. As to the method, uniform phase sampling is the key algorithm. At first, the relation between uniform time sampling and uniform phase sampling is discussed in detail. This relation shows that the equivalence between uniform phase sampling and uniform time sampling is the necessary and sufficient condition for a non Doppler shifted signal. Next, the algorithm of Doppler shift compensation and virtualized antenna array is proposed, in which 1) original Doppler shifted signal is processed with interpolation, 2) new signals are generated by uniform phase sampling and buffered, 3) buffered new signals are read out by uniform time sampling. The theory of this process and the performance improvement for a high speed mobile communications system is mathematically analyzed, and the hardware architecture model of this algorithm is also given. The diversity gain could be obtained when an antenna array is used. In order to verify that this virtualized antenna array has the same benefit, the ability to suppress the interference and the bit error rate is analyzed with numerical simulation. The number of virtual elements and the virtual element distance are two variables related to the direction pattern of virtual antenna array. The effects of these two variables are given by the simulation, showing that the more virtual elements, the narrower beam are obtained. But more virtual elements result in more complicated hardware source. In addition, the communications scenarios of two communications radiators at different sites are simulated to verify whether this algorithm can suppress interference signal. The frequency spectrum of beamformed virtual antenna array signal shows that the interference signal can be suppressed effectively. These characteristics cannot be provided by pure Doppler frequency shift compensation. Thus these results show that high speed mobile communication systems on aircrafts or high speed trains would obtain better performances when a received Doppler shift signal is processed by this method to construct a virtual antenna array.