Application of Smart Antennas to Wideband Code Division Multiple Access : the Uplink Performance

Adaptive antenna arrays have recently been introduced to cope with the high capacity required by the 3 generation (3G) wireless communications systems. As adaptive antenna arrays focus narrow high gain beams towards the desired user and nulls towards interferers, both coverage and capacity of the network can be improved. To establish the performance gain that a smart antenna can deliver in a 3G environment (i.e., with mixed traffic), the implementation of adaptive antenna arrays for the uplink of a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access ( W C D M A ) system in the Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) mode is addressed in this thesis. The beam-forming is implemented with a L S D R M T A algorithm and a Lagrange multiplier based algorithm using the Q channel only. The results show that the adaptive antenna arrays offer significant performance enhancement over switched beam and single antennas in a 3 G environment (i.e., with mixed traffic).