5. Cognitive Antenna System for Sustainable Adaptive Radio Interfaces

Communication systems are usually implemented on a heterogeneous infrastructure and must operate in environments with accelerated dynamics. Adaptation is thus a key feature of such a system. Long-term, sustainable, adaptive solutions did not receive much attention in the design phase of wireless communication systems. With the advent of LTE, which was designed as a highly flexible radio interface—created to evolve—there is room for disruptive solutions to be put in place. A new approach for the receiver is proposed, where the antenna takes an active role in characterising and eventually learning the operation environment. The proposed solution—a Cognitive Antenna System (CAS), is based on two main mechanisms that we called antenna vision (AV) and signal fishing (SF). In the core cognitive cycle ‘observe-decide-act’ we aim to improve the ‘observe’ part, which critically influences the whole decision process. The SF and AV mechanisms bring a set of advantages: higher received SNR, no additional noise, higher AoA estimation accuracy.