The effect of group-delay difference for wideband antenna arraying: Degradation and its solution

Antenna arraying, which is an important approach for weak signal reception, can effectively improve the received SNR. For wideband signal arraying, group-delay difference between antennas may lead to great combining loss. In this paper, the effect of group-delay difference between antennas on combining SNR is studied. A frequency domain division method, which divides each path of the received signal into several narrowband sub-blocks and accomplishes arraying respectively, is proposed to minimize the arraying degradation. Compared with SIMPLE algorithm, phase compensation effect is investigated via MMSE method. Numerical results show that the proposed method could almost eliminate the effect of group-delay difference and effectively reduce the combining loss.