Comparative Analysis of Direction Of Arrival Estimation and Beamforming Techniques in Smart Antennas

The term smart antenna incorporates all situations in which a system is using an antenna array and the antenna pattern is dynamically adjusted by the system required.Two major issues in smart antennas are Direciton of Arrival (DOA) estimation and beamforming. The Direction of Arrival of all the incoming signals including the interfering signals are estimated using DOA algorithms.Some of the DOA algorithms are the maximum-likelihood method, linear-prediction method and MUSIC (MUltiple Signal Classification) method. A beam is steered in the direction of desired signal and the user is tracked as he moves while placing nulls at interfering signal directions by constantly updating the complex weights. Based on the angle information the beamforming network computes the complex weights required for beam steering. Two most commonly used methods are Conventional BeamForming (CBF) and Dolph-Chebyshev method. In this paper we simulated various DOA and beamforming algorithms using MATLAB and ∗mailto:[email protected] †mailto:[email protected] ‡mailto:[email protected] compared thier performances like bias , variability and resolution.