Effect of delay-spread and fading on the performance of an adaptive dual-antenna handset

This paper investigates the relation between bandwidth and the delay-spread in order to assess the performance of an adaptive dual-antenna handset. In order to do this; a relation between the measured delay-spread using narrowband pulses and the radio-channel delay-spread based on wideband pulses is presented. Delay-spread values are presented that have been measured with different bandwidths using a dedicated indoor setup. These values are corrected for the effect of the bandwidth of the pulses to obtain the delay-spread of the radio-channel. Next a dual-antenna equal-gain diversity receiver is introduced. Its performance to reduce delay-spread is analysed for two simple algorithms; one that maximises signal-strength and one that minimises delay-spread. It turns out that antenna diversity can be an effective countermeasure to reduce delay-spread. Especially the delay-spread in narrowband communication links is significantly reduced by using diversity