• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
• /
• v.8 no.6
• /
• pp.907-915
• /
• 2013

Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) is an auxiliary safety system for recognizing the condition of tires based on the pressure and temperature data transmitted from the sensor unit installed on a tire of the vehicle. Using TPMS, a driver can frequently check the state of tires and it aids to maintain the optimum running condition of the vehicle. Since TPMS must utilize the wireless communication technique to transmit data from a sensor unit to a signal processing unit installed in the vehicle, it suffers from interference signals caused by various external electrical or electronic devices. In order to suppress high-power interference signals, we employ beamforming techniques based on the uniform linear antenna array. As the number of the antennas is increased, the performance of the interference suppression is improved. However, there is the limit of the number of antennas, installed in the center of a vehicle, because of its size. In this paper, we compare and analyze the performance of the beamformer, when reducing the interelement spacing of antennas, to increase the number of the receiving antennas. For the performance analysis of the beamformers, we consider the switching beamformer and minimum-variance distortionless-response (MVDR) beamformer for TPMS, recently proposed.