An Enhanced PID Control Technique for Mobile Satellite Dish Antenna Network within Nigeria

Abstract

Abstract – This paper has implemented an improved Proportional Integral and Derivative (PID) control technique for mobile satellite dish antenna network within Nigeria. As a result of the large geographical area of Nigeria, distance between base station and field antenna seems too long and this introduced time delay variableness. Hence a controller that would address this problem and at the same time ensured adequate positioning of the dish antenna for fast, accurate and precise line of sight operation in terms of optimal and robust tracking was required. In order to achieve this, the transfer functions representing the dynamics of a dish antenna position process and the time delay in transmit and receive paths were obtained. The system was modelled in MATLAB/Simulink and simulated without being compensated. The output response in terms of position in degree for unit constant input revealed that a compensator was needed to improve the transient and steady state performance of the system. A PID controller was designed using the manual tuning of the MATLAB/Simulink PID tuner. The Simulink model of the PID control for dish antenna position system was developed.  The performance of the  proposed system was analysed in terms time domain performance parameters such as rise time, peak time, settling time, overshoot,  steady state error, Integral Square Error (ISE), Integral Absolute Error (IAE) and Integral Time Absolute Error (ITAE). Simulations were conducted and results obtained were compared with the uncompensated system and existing system. The results showed that the proposed system provided stable, robust and improved tracking performance with more efficient time delay handling capacity than the uncompensated and existing system.