Open Access Research Article

Smart Antenna UKM Testbed for Digital Beamforming System

Mohammad Tariqul Islam1*, Norbahiah Misran12 and Baharudin Yatim1

Author Affiliations

1 Institute of Space Science (ANGKASA), National University of Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia

2 Department of Electrical, Electronics & System Engineering, National University of Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2009, 2009:128516  doi:10.1155/2009/128516


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2009/1/128516


Received: 4 May 2008
Revisions received: 11 November 2008
Accepted: 6 January 2009
Published: 12 February 2009

© 2009 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A new design of smart antenna testbed developed at UKM for digital beamforming purpose is proposed. The smart antenna UKM testbed developed based on modular design employing two novel designs of L-probe fed inverted hybrid E-H (LIEH) array antenna and software reconfigurable digital beamforming system (DBS). The antenna is developed based on using the novel LIEH microstrip patch element design arranged into uniform linear array antenna. An interface board is designed to interface to the ADC board with the RF front-end receiver. The modular concept of the system provides the capability to test the antenna hardware, beamforming unit, and beamforming algorithm in an independent manner, thus allowing the smart antenna system to be developed and tested in parallel, hence reduces the design time. The DBS was developed using a high-performance floating-point DSP board and a 4-channel RF front-end receiver developed in-house. An interface board is designed to interface to the ADC board with the RF front-end receiver. A four-element receiving array testbed at 1.88–2.22 GHz frequency is constructed, and digital beamforming on this testbed is successfully demonstrated.

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