Beamforming Control System Design for Broadband Wireless Access Antenna

The Smart antenna for Broadband Wireless Access used beamforming method by focusing the direction of the antenna beam to some desired targets. This paper discusses beamforming control system to control the direction of the antenna beams electronically by using 16MHz Arduino platform-based microcontroller algorithm. The microcontroller was programmed to control the switching network that connects to the butler matrix system and antenna array, so the input and output mechanisms of the switching network run appropriately. The control system used a comparative scheme between the analog output voltage and the reference voltage, called RSSI (received signal strength indicator) algorithm. Algorithm results showed that the control mechanism can be used for the multibeam concept with four input ports and 15 combinations (multibeam). In addition, this system can allow multiple inputs and outputs in parallel bit processing with a single clock. Therefore, all process was 16 times faster than the serial 8 bits stream microcontroller.