Investigations into Smart Antennas for CDMA Wireless Systems

Field: Engineering (Physical Sciences)

Over the last few years, wireless cellular communications has experienced rapid growth in the demand for provision of high data rate wireless multimedia services. This fact motivates the need to find ways to improve the spectrum efficiency of wireless communication systems. Smart or adaptive antennas have emerged as a promising technology to enhance the spectrum efficiency of present and future wireless communications systems by exploiting the spatial domain. The aim of this thesis is to investigate smart antenna applications for Direct Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) systems. CDMA is chosen as the platform for this thesis work since it has been adopted as the air-interface technology by the Third Generation (3G) wireless communication systems. The main role of smart antennas is to mitigate Multiple Access Interference (MAI) by beamforming (i.e. spatial filtering) operation. Therefore, irrespective of a particular wireless communication system, it is important to consider whether a chosen array configuration will enable optimal performance. In this thesis an initial assessment is carried out considering linear and circular array of dipoles, that can be part of a base station antenna system. A unified and systematic approach is proposed to analyse and compare the interference rejection capabilities of the two array configurations in terms of the Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) at the array output. The theoretical framework is then extended to include the effect of mutual coupling, which is modelled using both analytical and simulation methods. Results show that when the performance is averaged over all angles of arrival and mutual coupling is negligible, linear arrays show similar performance as circular arrays. Thus in the remaining part of this thesis, only linear arrays are considered. In order to properly evaluate the performance of smart antenna systems, a realistic channel model is required that takes into account both temporal and spatial propagation characteristics of the wireless channel. In this regard, a novel parameterized physical channel model is proposed in this thesis. The new model incorporates parameters such as user mobility, azimuth angle of arrival, angle spread and Doppler frequency, which have critical influence on the performance of smart antennas. A mathematical formulation of the channel model is presented and the proposed model is implemented in software using Matlab. The statistics of the simulated channels are analysed and compared with theory to confirm that the proposed model can accurately simulate Rayleigh and Rician fading characteristics. To assist system planners in the design and deployment of smart antennas, it is important to develop robust analytical tools to assess the impact of smart antennas on cellular systems. In this thesis an analytical model is presented for evaluating the Bit Error Rate (BER) of a DS-CDMA system employing an array antenna operating in Rayleigh and Rician fading environments. The DS-CDMA system is assumed to employ noncoherent M-ary orthogonal modulation, which is relevant to IS-95 CDMA and cdma2000. Using the analytical model, an expression of the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) at the output of the smart antenna receiver is derived, which allows the BER to be evaluated using a closed-form expression. The proposed model is shown to provide good agreement with the (computationally intensive) Monte Carlo simulation results and can be used to rapidly calculate the system performance for suburban and urban fading environments. In addition to MAI, the performance of CDMA systems is limited by fast fading. In this context, a hybrid scheme of beamforming and diversity called Hierarchical Beamforming (HBF) is investigated in this thesis to jointly combat MAI and fading. The main idea behind HBF is to divide the antenna elements into widely separated groups to form subbeamforming arrays. The performance of a hierarchical beamforming receiver, applied to an IS-95 CDMA system, is compared with smart antenna (conventional beamforming) receiver and the effect of varying the system and channel parameters is studied. The simulation results show that the performance of hierarchical beamforming is sensitive to the operating conditions, especially the value of the azimuth angle spread. The work presented in this thesis has been published in part in several journals and refereed conference papers, which reflects the originality and significance of the thesis contributions.