The Effects of Antenna Pointing Error on Bit Error Rate Performance in Mobile Directional Antenna Applications

This paper investigates the issue of antenna pointing error in mobile directional antenna applications and its impact on bit error rate (BER) performance of the link. BER performance is investigated for a variety of postulated antenna characteristics in order to determine the sensitivity of BER performance to antenna pointing inaccuracies. The method employed uses motion dynamics derived from vehicular road course tests to determine power fade profiles for various antenna types as a function of antenna pointing accuracy. These power fade profiles are then used to characterize these channels as Rician multipath channels. Finally antenna pointing accuracy is mapped directly to link BER performance for an uncoded differential phase shift keying (DPSK) waveform. This study has found that this is a complex multi-dimensional problem. Power fades resulting from pointing inaccuracy generally deteriorate for larger antennas with narrow beamwidths. However, smaller antennas are more susceptible to multipath effects due to increased beamwidth. Results of this paper suggests that, contrary to what intuition might initially suggest, larger antennas with more narrow beamwidths may actually outperform smaller antennas in mobile applications