Sunday, October 27, 2013

Follow Up : Antennas

Here is some more information about the latest development in antennas. The main advantage of using the smart antennas is efficiency in terms of cost and performance. The concept of smart antennas took shape while the OEM's were busy making the devices thinner and 3GPP was implementing MIMO and other technologies for better performance. 

The push from both these ends helped the growth of smart antennas. The smaller sizes and higher capacity was achieved using these antennas.

Lets discuss some details about the DOA estimation , beamforming and a little about MIMO (as we have already covered this in the LTE Follow-up)


DOA Estimation : DOA stands for Direction of Arrival. There are antennas that can estimate the direction of arrival of the signal and act accordingly, isn't it smart! We get the advantages of the directional antennas without the restrictions that come with it. There is a sensor array that has multiple sensors and it determines the direction of the radiowave propagation.

Beamforming : Beamforming or spatial filtering is a signal processing technique used in sensor arrays for directional signal transmission or reception! Beamforming is done using conventional methods or adaptive methods.  Adaptive beamforming provides the flexibility of working across different situations.

MIMO : Multiple Input Multiple Output techniques are widely used in LTE and advanced standards.It supports higher data rates and provides higher resistance against multipath and channel fading. I don't want to repeat what we already discussed in LTE : Follow up here. There is one advanced concept here, MuMIMO - Multi user MIMO. In this case multiple user devices can transmit simultaneously on the same resource block.








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