UMP awarded prestigious Motorola Solutions Foundation grant

Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) was recently awarded the prestigious Motorola Solutions Foundation grant for its “MySTEM Project: A STEM Outreach Program” at a ceremony in Penang on March 1, 2019

Adaptive array antenna design for wireless communication systems

Adaptive array antennas use has been limited to non-commercial applications due to their high cost and hardware complexity. The implementation cost of adaptive array antennas can be kept to a minimum by using cost effective antennas, reducing the number of elements in the array and implementing efficient beamforming techniques. This thesis presents techniques for the design of adaptive array antennas which will enable their cost effective implementation in wireless communication systems. The techniques are investigated from three perspectives, namely, reconfigurable antenna design, wide scan array design and single-port beamforming technique. A novel single-feed polarisation reconfigurable antenna design is proposed in the first stage of this study. Different polarisation states, namely, linear polarisation (LP), left-hand circular polarisation (LHCP) and right-hand circular polarisation (RHCP), are achieved by perturbing the shape of the main radiating structure of the antenna. The proposed antenna exhibits good axial ratio (< 3 dB at 2.4 GHz) and has high radiation efficiency in both polarisation modes (91.5 % - LHCP and 86.9 % - RHCP). With a compact single feeding structure, the antenna is suitable for implementation in wireless communication devices. The second stage of the study presents the design procedure of wide scan adaptive array antennas with reduced number of elements. Adaptive array antennas with limited number of elements have limited scanning range, reduced angular scanning resolution and high sidelobe levels. To date, design synthesis of adaptive array antennas has been targeted on arrays with a large number of elements. This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of adaptive array antennas with less than 10 elements. Different array configurations are analysed and various array design parameters such as number of elements, separation between elements and orientation of the elements are analysed in terms of their 3 dB scan range. The proposed array, the 3-faceted array, achieves a scanning range up to ±70°, which is higher than ±56° obtained from the Uniform Linear Array. The faceted arrays are then evaluated in the context of adaptive beamforming properties. It was shown that the 3-faceted array is suitable for adaptive array applications in wireless communication systems as it achieves the highest directivity compared to other faceted structures. The 3-faceted array is then synthesised for low sidelobe level. Phase correction together with amplitude tapering technique is applied to the 3-faceted array. The use of conventional and tuneable windowing techniques on the 3- faceted array is also analysed. The final stage of the study investigates beamforming techniques for the adaptive array antenna. In the first part, beamforming algorithms using different performance criteria, which include maximum signal-to noise-ratio (SINR), minimum (mean-square Error) MSE and power minimisation, are evaluated. In the second part, single-port beamforming techniques are explored. In previous single-port beamforming methods, the spatial information of the signals is not fully recovered and this limits the use of conventional adaptive beamforming algorithms. In this thesis, a novel signal estimation technique using pseudo-inverse function for single-port beamforming is proposed. The proposed polarisation reconfigurable antenna, the 3-faceted array antenna and the single-port beamforming technique achieve the required performance, which suggests the potential of adaptive array antennas to be deployed commercially, especially in wireless communication industry

UMP receives visit from Petrosains

PEKAN, 16 June 2023 – A delegation from Petrosains, led by its CEO En Ezarisma Azni Mohamad, recently visited the UMP STEM Lab, accompanied by esteemed members of the Petrosains team

Petrosains RBTX Challenge 2023 empowers robotics enthusiasts in Pahang

PEKAN, 18 June 2023 – The excitement of robotics filled the air as Petrosains, in collaboration with the Sports and Arts Education Division, Ministry of Education, Malaysia, organised the highly anticipated Petrosains RBTX Challenge 2023

UMP Bosch Rexroth Academy

Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP)–Bosch Rexroth Academy is a unique collaboration between Bosch Rexroth, the world leader in control and drive industries, and Universiti Malaysia Pahang aimed at accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. The Academy provides a platform for businesses and universities to work together on research and development projects that will help drive the industry’s digital transformation

FPGA Implementation Of A Multihop Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Ring Router Algorithm

In order to make the optimum use of a large capacity of optical fibers, a quick routing algorithm is essential. Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is a technology that is widely employed to fully the huge bandwidth provided by optical fibers and to alleviate electronic bottleneck. WDM network is broadly divided into two categories; single-hop and multi-hop. For multi-hop network, a packet from a source to a destination may have to hop through one or more intermediate nodes. A routing algorithm, Comparing Dimensional Number Routing has been proposed to fully exploit the bandwidth of fiber optics

3-Faceted Array With Low Side Lobe Levels Using Tunable Windows

In this paper, a 3-faceted phased array antenna synthesised for low side lobe levels using a tuneable window is presented. The array consists of eight left hand circularly polarised antennas. The phase difference of the antennas on the faceted structure is first compensated for and then an amplitude tapering method is used to synthesise the array to have a low sidelobe level, (SLL). The effect of the phase compensation on the angular scanning range of the 3-faceted array is then investigated. Simulation results show that the radiation patterns generated with tuneable windows, such as Kaiser, Chebyshev and Taylor, have a similar profile to the uniform amplitude distribution but with a much lower SLL and broader main beam. This technique enables the faceted structure to be synthesised for low SLL and at the same time retain its radiation pattern profile

FPGA implementation of metaheuristic optimization algorithm

Metaheuristic algorithms are gaining popularity amongst researchers due to their ability to solve nonlinear optimization problems as well as the ability to be adapted to solve a variety of problems. There is a surge of novel metaheuristics proposed recently, however it is uncertain whether they are suitable for FPGA implementation. In addition, there exists a variety of design methodologies to implement metaheuristics upon FPGA which may improve the performance of the implementation. The project begins by researching and identifying metaheuristics which are suitable for FPGA implementation. The selected metaheuristic was the Simulated Kalman Filter (SKF) which proposed an algorithm that was low in complexity and used a small number of steps. Then the Discrete SKF was adapted from the original metaheuristic by rounding all floating-point values to integers as well as setting a fixed Kalman gain of 0.5. The Discrete SKF was then modeled using behavioral modeling to produce the Binary SKF which was then implemented onto FPGA. The design was made modular by producing separate modules that managed different parts of the metaheuristic and Parallel-In-Parallel-Out configuration of ports was also implemented. The Discrete SKF was then simulated on MATLAB meanwhile the Binary SKF was implemented onto FPGA and their performance were measured based on chip utilization, processing speed, and accuracy of results. The Binary SKF produced speed increment of up to 69 times faster than the Discrete SKF simulation

The Impact of Noise Label on Beampattern and SINR of MVDR Beamformer

Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) is basically a unity gain adaptive beamformer which is suffered from performance degradation due to the presence of interference and noise. Also, MVDR is sensitive to errors such as the steering vector errors, and the nulling level. MVDR combined with a linear antenna array (LAA) is used to acquire desired signals and suppress the interference and noise. This paper examines the impact of the noise variance label (σn2) and the number of interference sources by using Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) and array beampattern as two different Figure-of-Merits to measure the performance of the MVDR beamformer with a fixed number of array elements (L). The findings of this study indicate that the MVDR have successfully placed nulls in the nonlook angle with average SINR of 99.6, 49.6, 24.9 dB dB for σn2.of -50, 0, 50 dB, respectively. Also, the MVDR provides accurate majorlobe to the real user direction, even the σn2 are bigger than desired signal power. The proposed method was found to perform better than some existing techniques. Based on this analysis, the beampattern is not heavily relies on the σn2. Moreover, the SINR strongly depends on the σn2 and the number of SNOIs

MVDR ALGORITHM BASED LINEAR ANTENNA ARRAY PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT FOR ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING APPLICATION

The performance of Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) beamformer is sensitive to errors such as the steering vector errors, the finite snapshots, and unsatisfactory null-forming level. In this paper, a combination of MVDR with linear antenna arrays (LAAs) for two scanning angles process in the azimuth and elevation are used to illustrate the MVDR performance against error which results in acquiring the desired signal and suppressing the interference and noise. The impact of various parameters, such as the number of elements in the array, space separation between array elements, the number of interference sources, noise power level, and the number of snapshots on the MVDR are investigated. The MVDR performance is evaluated with two important metrics: beampattern of two scanning angles and Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR). The results found that the MVDR performance improves as the number of array elements increases. The beampattern relies on the number of elements and the separation between array elements. The best interelement spacing obtained is 0.5λ that avoids grating lobes and mutual coupling effects. Besides, the SINR strongly depends on the noise power label and a number of snapshots. When the noise power label increased, the MVDR performance degraded as well the null width increases in the elevation direction as well as more accurate resolution occurred when the number of snapshots increased. Finally, it is found the proposed method achieves SINR better than existing techniques