Design of Low Power Thinned Smart Antenna for 6G Sky Connection

Abstract

To improve radio access capability, sky connections relying on satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), as well as high-altitude platforms (HAP) will be exploited in 6G wireless communication systems, complementing terrestrial networks. For long-distance communication, a large smart antenna will be used that is characterized by high amounts of power consumed by digital beamformers. This paper focuses on reducing power consumption by relying on a thinned smart antenna (TSA). The performance of TSA is investigated in the sub-6 GHz band. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to optimize excitation weights of the individual dipoles in the antenna array and these excitation weights are then used in TSA for beamforming, with signal processing algorithms deployed. The DE technique is used with the least mean square, recursive least square and sample matrix inversion algorithms. The proposed method offers almost the same directivity, simultaneously ensuring lower side lobes (SLL) and reduced power consumption. For a TSA of 20, 31, and 64 dipoles, the power savings are 20%, 19.4%, and 17.2%, respectively. SLL reductions achieved, in turn, vary from 5.2 dB to 8.1 dB.