System Design and Evaluation of Digital Retrodirective Array Antenna for High Speed Tracking Performance

Key Words: Beam forming, Digital RDA, Phase conjugation, beam tracking, hybrid beamforming. The retrodirective array antenna system is operated faster than existing techniques of beamforming due to its less complexity. Therefore, it is effective for beam tracking in the environment of fast vehicle. On the other hand, it also has difficulty in estimating AOA according to multipath environment or multiuser signals. To improve the certainty of estimating AOA), this article proposes hybrid digital retrodirective array antenna systme combined with MUSIC algorithm. In this paper, the digital retrodirective array antenna system is designed according to the number of antenna array by using only one digital PLL which finds angle of delayed phase. And we evaluate the performance of the digital retrodirective array antenna for the high speed tracking application. Performance is studied by simulink when the speed of mobile is 300km/h and the distance between transmitter and receiver is 100m and then we have to confirm the performance of the system in multi path environment. As a result, the mean of AOA (Angle Of Arrival) error is 4.2 ° when SNR is 10dB and it is 1.3° when SNR is 20dB. Consequently, the digital RDA shows very good performance for high speed tracking due t