Hardware Real-Time Simulator (HWES) for Smart Antennas

The field of smart antennas has matured significantly over the past decade. It has become clear that this area of work will provide a key technology for the wireless communication industry. In a context of a research project a hardware real-time simulator (HWES) was developed for smart antennas. This simulator enables algorithms for smart antennas to be simulated and evaluated in real time. The advantage of using a real-time simulator is routed in finding the best smart antenna algorithms for existing and future 3G mobile telecommunication systems and wireless LANs. The simulation is conducted in base band and consists of a transmitter, a transmission channel (geometry-based stochastic channel model based on COST 259) and a multi-channel receiver for the mobile station side (receiver array using algorithms for smart antennas). While most other channel simulators base on taped delay lines the presented channel simulator works on a 2 dimensional geometric basis.