Mitigation of pilot pollution through base station antenna configuration in WCDMA

Pilot pollution is observed in areas where a mobile station does not have enough RAKE fingers for processing all the received pilot signals or there is no dominant pilot signal at all. The paper evaluates the impact of base station antenna configuration in a 3-sectored site and in different 6-sectored WCDMA sites on the amount of pilot pollution. The results show that pilot polluted areas can be reduced simply by defining a proper base station antenna configuration by means of antenna horizontal beamwidth and downtilt. However, more advanced methods are needed in order to decrease pilot polluted areas further.