Optimization of Array Antenna Technology for Space Applications

There are numerous ways to design a wireless communication system using phased array antennas. The overall system design is a trade off between power consumption, cost of system, amount of simultaneous communication links and spatial separation required to avoid inter-link interference. All while maintaining robustness and reliability at varying channel conditions. To help with this, a simulation environment has been created in MATLAB where most parameters in a wireless communication system using phased array antennas, can be changed to evaluate performance. This environment focuses on assessing both the performance and computational complexity of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithms and beamforming algorithms applied to satellite downlink, where the main metric of performance is bit error rate (BER). For DOA estimation, Beamscan, Minimal Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) and Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) have been implemented and evaluated. For beamforming, Phase shift, Minimal Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR), Linear Constraint Minimum Variance (LCMV), Frost and Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (GSC) have been implemented and evaluated. The simulation environment has successfully been created and yields reasonable results, where with relative ease one can implement and test most combinations of a phased array communication channel. There still is room for improvement to make the simulations more efficient and more realistic. The calculations of computational load have been written using support functions, making it easy to calculate computational load for other algorithms in the future. Computational load is presented in floating point operations (FLOP) per iteration of an algorithm and computational hardware solutions have been explored.