Jitter diversity in multipath environments

The lack of capacity in mobile communication systems is an increasing problem. A channel model for the use of antenna arrays at the base station is presented. A new diversity scheme, jitter diversity, is suggested with a simple algorithm. The technique is to use an antenna array and move the main beam slightly to avoid deep fades, giving substantial improvement in the fading distribution and the mean power. Linear antenna arrays with 1-19 elements are applied to propagation environments with different scatterer spread. The influence of the environments on the received antenna pattern, such as the effective gain, is investigated. Experiments support the main findings, namely that the environments reduce the directivity of the perceived antenna diagram by several dB. Jitter diversity is a very simple approach, compared to other combining methods, as it only includes the variation of a single parameter, the phase between elements. It should therefore be simple to implement in practice.