Implementation of switched beam smart antenna using artificial neural network

Abstract

The capacity enhancement promised by switched beam smart antenna is a function of efficient selection of the active beam at each point in time. This article presents the use of artificial neural network (ANN) to improve the performance of switched beam smart antenna. The proposed method is based on feed forward backpropagation ANN. In this design, samples of the calibration of the footprint of the base station is mapped to the radiation pattern of Butler matrix (BM) base station antenna arrays. A $$4\times 4$$4×4 BM is designed to implement the developed technique and a digitizer applied to obtain the ANN training data. The results are compared with the existing numerical method and negative selection algorithm based on received signal strength indicator. It is shown that the proposed method exhibits a better switching performance