• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.18 no.9
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• pp.2109-2116
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• 2014

This paper presents the implementation and design of the advanced WI-FI systems with beam-forming antenna that radiate their power to the direction of user equipment to improve the overall throughput, contrast to the general WI-FI systems equipped with omni-antenna. The system consists of patch array antenna, DSP, FPGA, and Qualcomm's commercial chip. The beam-forming system on the FPGA utilizes the packet information from Qualcomm's commercial chip to control the phase shifters and attenuators of the patch array antenna. The PCI express interface has been used to maximize the communication speed between DSP and FPGA. The directions of arrival of users are managed using the database, and each user is distinguished by the MAC address given from the packet information. When the system wants to transmit a packet to one user, it forms beams to the direction of arrival of the corresponding user stored in the database to maximize the throughput. Directions of arrival of users are estimated using the received preamble in the packet to make its SINR as high as possible. The proposed beam-forming system was implemented using an FPGA and Qualcommm's commercial chip together. The implemented system showed considerable throughput improvement over the existing general AP system with omni-directional antenna in the multi-user communication environment.