Effect of Array Geometry on the Capacity of the Turbo-Coded Beamforming Aided Uplink

This paper investigates the effect of different array geometries on the performance of the turbo coding assisted beamforming uplink. More specifically, we focus on the maximum achievable rate as a measure of the system performance, which is calculated with the aid of EXIT chart analysis. Our performance results recorded for K = 4 uplink receiver antenna elements at the Base Station (BS) supporting M = 4 or M = 7 users demonstrated that the Hexagonal Array (HA) slightly outperforms the Uniform Linear Array (ULA) and Uniform Circular Array (UCA), when we have a low angular spread ¿ for the Direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) of each user. It is also demonstrated that the performance difference becomes smaller upon increasing the angular spread ¿.