Software radio architecture with smart antennas: a tutorial on algorithms and complexity

There has been considerable interest in using antenna arrays in wireless communication networks to increase the capacity and decrease the cochannel interference. Adaptive beamforming with smart antennas at the receiver increases the carrier-to-interference ratio (CIR) in a wireless link. This paper considers a wireless network with beamforming capabilities at the receiver which allows two or more transmitters to share the same channel to communicate with the base station. The concrete computational complexity and algorithm structure of a base station are considered in terms of a software radio system model, initially with an omnidirectional antenna. The software radio computational model is then expanded to characterize a network with smart antennas. The application of the software radio smart antenna is demonstrated through two examples. First, traffic improvement in a network with a smart antenna is considered, and the implementation of a hand-off algorithm in the software radio is presented. The blocking probabilities of the calls and total carried traffic in the system under different traffic policies are derived. The analytical and numerical results show that adaptive beamforming at the receiver reduces the probability of blocking and forced termination of the calls and increases the total carried traffic in the system. Then, a joint beamforming and power control algorithm is implemented in a software radio smart antenna in a CDMA network. This shows that, by using smart antennas, each user can transmit with much lower power, and therefore the system capacity increases significantly.