SMART ANTENNAS

Beam-Forming Basics
The term beam forming relates to the capability of the antenna array
to focus energy toward a specific direction in space and nulls in the
undesired directions. For this reason, beam forming is often referred
to as spatial filtering.
Just spatial filtering or beam forming was the first approach to
carrying out spacetime processing of data sampled at antenna
arrays.
The Bartlett (conventional) beam former was the first to emerge
during World War II
Later, adaptive beam formers and classical time-delay estimation
techniques were applied to enhance the ability to resolve closely
spaced signal sources.