Structure and implementation of smart antennas based on software radio

Recently software radio (SR) has become one of the most active research and development products in wireless telecommunication. The reason of our using smart antennas derived from self-adaptive antenna array is that smart antennas have the ability to emit several narrow-band beams concurrently, receive anticipated signals more effectively, and even shield various types of interference. Besides, it also has many other attractive features such as multiple access compensation, low cost broadband, and low power consumption. The combination of SR technology and smart antennas will motivate the design of smart antennas, especially for serving telecommunication market. With their properly designed hardware and software, smart antennas can adopt optimum mode according to the situation. Also, in the open structure of SR, the improvement of smart antennas´ function under the old hardware condition is more feasible. This paper addresses the integration of SR and smart antennas. Given the structure of a SR, we describe how to merge in the functionalities of smart antennas with the latest DSP technique, to meet the SR design requirement.