Experimental evaluation of smart antenna system performance for capacity improvement

In wireless communications, smart antenna systems (or antenna arrays) can be used to increase system capacity by supporting multiple co-channel users in reception and transmission. In addition, the system capacity is limited by the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), which can be significantly improved by the smart antenna system, providing another boost to the capacity. This paper presents experimental results for the SIR of two moving users, comparing different beamforming algorithms in typical wireless scenarios. The experiments were performed using the 900 MHz smart antenna testbed at The University of Texas at Austin.