Comparison of Adaptive Antenna Arrays Controlled by Gradient Algorithms

Abstract

The paper presents the Simple Kalman filter (SKF) that has been designed for the control of digital adaptive antenna arrays. The SKF has been applied to the pilot signal system and the steering vector one. The above systems based on the SKF are compared with adaptive antenna arrays controlled by the classical LMS and the Variable Step Size (VSS) LMS algorithms and by the pure Kalman filter. It is shown that the pure Kalman filter is the most convenient for the control of the adaptive arrays because it does not require any a priori information about noise statistics and excels in high rate of convergence and low misadjustment. Extremely high computational requirements are drawback of this filter. Hence, if low computational power of signal processors is at the disposal, the SKF is recommended to be used. Computational requirements of the SKF are of the same order as the classical LMS algorithm exhibits. On the other hand, all the important features of the pure Kalman filter are inherited by the SKF. The paper shows that presented Kalman filters can be regarded as special gradient algorithms. That is why they can be compared with the LMS family.