A Comparative Study of Adaptive and Switched Beamforming for 5G Mobile Network Applications

Beamforming antennas are considerd as good candidates for 5G mobile network applications in mm-wave band. They provide a spectrum efficiency, a high data rate and an important coverage. The beamforming can be analog, digital or hybrid. A comparative study of analog and digital beamforming is discussed. Indeed, we have used a 4 \(\,\times \,\) 4 Butler matrix (BM) to steer the beam. However, a digital beamforming antennas has been achieved by using adaptive algorithms. As a result, the 4 \(\,\times \,\) 4 BM gives four predifined beam steering in the range of \(\pm 29^{\circ }\) whereas the adaptive algorithms show a good flexibility in which they can adapt the radiation pattern in real time but their weakness is a high power consumption.