Efficient Spectrum Utilization for Mobile Radio Systems Using Space Diversity

Space diversity combining is a well-known method of smoothing amplitude fluctuations of the received signal in Rayleigh fading environments, such as mobile radio. Perhaps less well known is that space diversity combining can also be an excellent method of combating cochannel interference. In this paper, it is shown that high spectrum efficiencies in mobile radio systems can be achieved with a modest number of space diversity branches. With a large number of diversity branches it is shown that frequency reuse is possible resulting in spectrum efficiencies, as defined herein, greater than 100 percent.