Effects of angular spread on smart antenna system with uniformly linear antenna array

This paper first investigates the complex spatial correlation of two antenna elements in smart antenna system. We find that the angle and angle spread of impinging signals and the inter-antenna distance have much effect on the spatial correlation, which influences the receiver performance. With the same receiver algorithm, we simulate and compare the effect of different angle spread values in the cases of ideal and real AOA estimation. The simulation results shows that in the case of ideal AOA estimation, the accuracy of AOA estimation is enough to guarantee that the smart antenna performance has little degradation while the real AOA estimation affected by the channel environment degrades the performance very obviously, especially for large angle spread.