Exploiting Directional Antennas for Reduced-Dimension Space–Time RAKE Receiving

We propose to combine directional antennas in a conformal array configuration with a matching two-stage receiver architecture to improve performance of code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems in time-varying channels. We propose a reduced-dimension space-time (ST) RAKE architecture that matches the ST correlation structure of the data received by a circular array. In time-varying channels, this reduced-dimension architecture outperforms the full-dimension architecture due to improved convergence of its adaptive processor.