No abstract

Beamforming has been an area of interest for a lot of research work as the multiantenna system has become an important topic in wireless communication. While both theoretical, as well as real-time practical implementation techniques for beamforming have been extensively researched, the existing techniques mainly focus on obtaining peak performance in the fastest and most accurate way possible and usually ignore applications providing improved performance with limited resource utilization. This paper further explores the concept of nonuniform spacing in such multiantenna receivers and shows how beamforming equivalent to regular uniform sensor arrays can be achieved and analyses many trade-offs that designers and users must consider for a minimalistic approach. The objective of this paper is to analyze various beamforming techniques on Uniform Linear Arrays (ULA) and the performance comparison between various techniques along with the analysis of output signal reconstruction and the array response. It also contains a detailed analysis of the uniformly spaced arrays and nested arrays using optimization techniques for error minimization. The construction of Non-uniform Linear Nested Arrays (NULNA) with optimum element spacing will be analyzed.

Adaptive beamforming has been studied extensively from a simulation point of view. While existing works compare various techniques based on their simulation output performance, their emulation on hardware systems and the prerequisite analysis of firmware viability remain relatively unexplored. The work presented in this paper addresses two issues. One is the firmware implementation of adaptive beamforming and the analysis of the Hardware Description Language implementation of the Least Mean Squares (LMS) Algorithm. It begins with the development of the algorithm on MATLAB Simulation Environment and proceeds to the synthesis of Verilog code for the same on Xilinx’s Vivado platform. The optimization of the LMS algorithm has been presented as a detailed case study for the successful reduction of the number of hardware resources utilized by a synthesized design on a target Artix-7 FPGA board.