Predictive Beamforming Antenna for Airborne Receiver Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing beamforming antennas with fewer than four radiating elements struggle to achieve high beam resolution, limiting their ability to mitigate interference effectively in global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).
Innovation Solution
A predictive beamforming antenna system that uses a predictive calculator processing unit to determine future positions of airborne receivers and calculate beamforming antenna parameters, allowing the system to generate beams at specific times to communicate with multiple airborne receivers, even with three or fewer radiating elements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If beamforming antennas use fewer than four radiating elements, then device complexity is reduced, but beam resolution deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system predicts future positions of airborne receivers in advance and pre-calculates beamforming parameters corresponding to these future positions. By performing the beamforming calculation ahead of time based on predicted positions, the system achieves high beam resolution with fewer than four radiating elements, resolving the contradiction between reduced device complexity and maintained measurement precision.
2Ease of manufacture
If beamforming antennas use fewer than four radiating elements, then ease of manufacture is improved, but ability to mitigate interference deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system predicts future positions of airborne receivers and pre-calculates beamforming parameters in advance. This preliminary action enables the antenna to form precise beams toward predicted receiver positions, effectively concentrating signal energy and mitigating interference even with fewer than four radiating elements, thus improving ease of manufacture while maintaining interference mitigation capability.
3Reliability
If the system generates beams at precise times based on predicted positions, then communication reliability with multiple airborne receivers is improved, but processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system predicts future positions of multiple airborne receivers and pre-calculates corresponding beamforming parameters in advance. By performing the computationally intensive prediction and parameter calculation beforehand, the system achieves reliable communication with multiple receivers at precise times while managing processing complexity through advance preparation rather than real-time computation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts beamforming parameters based on predicted positions of multiple airborne receivers. By making the beamforming parameters dynamic and adaptive to predicted receiver positions rather than static, the system achieves reliable communication with multiple moving receivers while the advance prediction approach keeps processing manageable.
Data Source
AI summary
An apparatus that includes a beamforming antenna is provided. The apparatus may include a predictive calculator processing unit to receive position information of one or more airborne receivers, determine future position information of the one or more airborne receivers as a function of time based on the received position information, and determine beamforming antenna parameters. The apparatus may include an antenna instruction processing unit to receive the beamforming antenna parameters and generate beamforming instructions based on the beamforming antenna parameters, a beamforming antenna to receive the beamforming instructions, and to generate a beam at a specified time based on the beamforming instructions to enable communication with at least one of the one or more airborne receivers, and a receiver processing unit to receive airborne receiver data from the at least one of the one or more airborne receivers, and generate output data based on the airborne receiver data.