Designing and implementing Multibeam Smart Antennas for high bandwidth UAV communications using FPGAs

Requirements for high bandwidth UAV communications are often necessary in order to move large amounts of mission information to/from Users in real-time. The focus of this paper is antenna beamforming for point-to-point, high bandwidth UAV communications in order to optimize transmit and receive power and support high data throughput communications. Specifically, this paper looks at the design and implementation of Multibeam Smart Antennas to implement antenna beamforming in an aerospace communications environment. The Smart Antenna is contrasted against Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based beamforming in order to quantify the increase in both computational load and FPGA resources required for multibeam adaptive signal processing in the Smart Antenna. The paper begins with an overall discussion of Smart Antenna design and general beamforming issues in high bandwidth communications. Important design considerations such as processing complexity in a constrained Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) environment are discussed. The focus of the paper is with respect to design and implementation of digital beamforming wideband communications waveforms using FPGAs. A Multibeam Time Delay element is introduced based on Lagrange Interpolation. Design data for Multibeam Smart Antennas in FPGAs is provided in the paper as well as reference circuits for implementation. Finally, an example Multibeam Smart Antenna design is provided based on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. The Multibeam Smart Antenna example design illustrates the concepts discussed in the paper and provides design insight into Multibeam Smart Antenna implementation from the point of view of implementation complexity, required hardware, and overall system performance gain.