Evaluation of diversity performance in GSM

The paper describes the results of experiments to evaluate the performance of diversity reception for GSM base station equipment. The results help to quantify the definition of diversity gain and show that the realisation of this gain is not in signal strength but is a system gain. Also, the dependency of the gain on the degree of correlation between the two receiving branches is shown. The impact of this on balancing the links in a cellular system is considered. The simulation was performed using actual base station hardware and a fading simulator.