The performance enhancement of multibeam adaptive base-station antennas for cellular land mobile radio systems

The problem of meeting the proliferating demands for mobile telephony within the confinement of the limited radio spectrum allocated to these services is addressed. A multiple-beam adaptive base-station antenna is proposed as a major system component in an attempt to solve this problem. The approach is demonstrated by employing an antenna array capable of resolving the angular distribution of the mobile users as seen at the base-station site, and then using this information to direct beams toward either lone mobiles, or groupings of mobiles, for both transmit and receive modes of operation. The energy associated with each mobile is thus confined within the addressed volume, greatly reducing the amount of cochannel interference experienced from and by neighboring cochannel cells. To ascertain the benefits of such an antenna, the conventional and proposed antenna systems are modeled in a typical mobile radio environment. For a given performance criterion, the theoretical results indicate that a significant increase in the spectral efficiency, or capacity, of the network is obtainable with the proposed antenna