ANTENNA ARRAYS - APPLICATION POSSIBILITY FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATION

Štefan Beník - Peter Hajach

   Scientists, communication specialists and engineers are developing sophisticated antenna arrays to be used in various mobile communication systems, including landmobile, indoor-radio, satellite-based systems. The antenna arrays are generally mounted on vehicles, aircraft, ships, satellites and base stations. An application of antenna arrays has been suggested in recent years for mobile communication systems to overcome the problem of limited channel bandwidth, thereby satisfying an ever growing demand for a large number of mobiles on communication channels. Many studies show that when an array is appropriately used in a mobile communication system, it helps in improving the system performance by increasing the channel capacity and spectrum efficiency, extending the range coverage, steering multiple beams to track many mobiles, and compensating aperture distortion electronically. It also reduces multipath fading, system complexity and cost. It has been argued that adaptive antennas and algorithms to control them are vital to high-capacity communication system development.

Keywords: antenna, antenna array, phased array, adaptive antenna, beamformer

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