3D Beamforming Techniques for Indoor UWB Wireless Communications

The main research in this paper is an ultra-wideband (UWB) three-dimensional (3D) circular antenna array and we highlight the importance of elevation angles and their influence of the system performance. The 3D channel is calculated by 3D shooting and bouncing ray/image techniques which specify multipath elevation angles and azimuth for horizontal plane angles. The capacities of the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional transmitting antenna arrays have been presented. Beam-synthesizing techniques are used at the transmitter to focus the transmitter energy for reducing the multi-path effect and increasing channel capacity. Asynchronous Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) methods are used to adjust the length of the feed line on each array element for maximizing the capacity. The higher directive gain obtained from the 3D antenna arrays results in high channel capacity compared to 2D azimuth-only antenna arrays. It is found the capacity for the 3D array increases more than 10% compared to that for the 2D array. Our research not only provides qualitative results, but also provides quantitative results.