EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING IN SMART ANTENNAS

Abstract

Smart Antennas have found applications in many fields like acoustic signal processing, RADAR communication, radio astronomy, SONAR communication and mobile communication, and in general, are known to increase the performance of a wireless link. In this report, there are many instances when the terms 'base station' and 'mobile station' are used. It means that the conversation made over there was in respect to the application of smart antennas in mobile communication. However, they are generally applicable to any wireless communication by taking the variation of scenarios into consideration. In the last decade, the application of smart antennas to mobile communication has gained huge interest among the research communities. They, in a broad sense, implement space-time processing to reduce the effects of multipath fading and co-channel interference at the base station. The work done here mainly focuses on beamforming, which means spatial filtering of antenna arrays to shape the radiation pattern in a desired way, according to a performance criterion. Research on adaptive array control is a vigorous and dynamic discipline, adapting with newly emerging communication applications, technologies, and requirements. This report outlines various adaptive beamforming schemes that can be used in smart antennas to improve the capacity and Quality of Service (QoS) of wireless networks. The problems of adaptive control usually are quite hard to solve due to high complexity of the objective functions and a significant number of problem-specific constraints; often an algorithm to solve such problems requires incorporation of some heuristic methods. Evolutionary algorithms are general-purpose population-based search procedures based on the mechanisms of natural selection and population genetics. They are appealing because they are simple, easy to use and flexible. This report focuses on the performance capabilities of different evolutionary algorithms for adaptive beamforming