Smart antennas for the GSM system: experimental results for a mobile reception

Abstract

The use of smart antennas in mobile radiocommunications cellular networks such as GSM network, to mitigate the fading effects and to increase the traffic capacity by exploiting the spatial division multiple access (SDMA) is actually of great interest. Although the implementation of smart antennas is mainly investigated on base stations, due in particular to obvious cumbersomeness reasons, it is still interesting to evaluate the smart antennas performance at the mobile level. The purpose of this paper is precisely to analyse quantitatively the performance of a smart antenna for a GSM-type downlink, from experimental data emitted at 810 MHz from a base station located in Paris and received on the mobile by a circular array of 5 dipoles, for different reception scenarios and both in the absence and in the presence of interference sources at the same frequency.