MMSE/EGC adaptive selection for nonuniformly aligned adaptive array antenna

When an adaptive array antenna is used in cellular and other mobile communication base stations for the purpose of improving SINR, the array antenna itself sometimes falls into a fading valley, resulting in failure to obtain an adequate improvement effect. While this problem can be solved by increasing the aperture length of the array antenna, simply increasing the aperture length alone increases the number of antenna elements, so that a large-scale adaptive array antenna becomes required, leading to the problem of failure of the weighting to track changes in the environment during fast fading. In this paper, we try to solve the first issue by making the element spacing nonuniformly aligned, reducing the number of elements. For the second issue, the weighting is divided into two layers, resolving the problem through both use of MMSE to eliminate interference and use of EGC for diversity combining. In a slow fading environment, however, favorable characteristics can be obtained when the entire weighting is controlled by MMSE. In this paper, we estimate the fading speed by the amount of envelope fluctuation in the desired signal after elimination of interference by the initial layer MMSE, and propose during slow fading the use of MMSE batch control, and during fast fading a control that incorporates both MMSE and EGC diversity combining. Finally, we use a computer simulation to evaluate the validity. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 90(12): 13–21, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20397