Impact of smart antenna designs on network throughput and BER

The demand for increased capacity in wireless networks motivated recent research toward wireless systems that exploit space selectivity. The paper presents a comprehensive effort on smart antennas that examines and integrates antenna array designs and beamforming, and the impact of these designs on the network throughput. Fading and coding channel modeling are also examined to improve the system BER. The antenna design that has been chosen is a planar array of rectangular microstrip elements, The frequency of operation is 20 GHz, and both 4×4 and 8×8 designs are examined. Tchebyscheff and adaptively beamformed designs are considered, and their impact on network throughput and system BER is examined. From the results, it is possible to provide guidelines for the design of smart antenna systems for optimum capacity in mobile ad hoc networks.