Design and implementation of a ferroelectric smart antenna system for 802.11b WLANs

Abstract

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an IEEE 802.11b WLAN smart antenna system for use in 802.11b WLAN network interface cards. The 2.4 GHz ferroelectric phase shifter is the key component for a two-element beam forming network (BFN). The smart antenna system is controlled by software that automatically adjusts the beam pattern to null interference, and maximize the signal power. More than three orders of magnitude improvement in receive bit-error rate (BER) were measured when steering the antenna to the optimum position.