An overview of smart antenna technology and its application to wireless communication systems

Space is one of the "final frontiers" of next generation wireless communication systems. Large-scale penetration of such such systems into our daily lives will require significant reductions in cost and increases in capacity, benefits proper exploitation of the spatial dimension can offer. That this is certainly the case is attested to by the significant number of companies that have been formed to bring products based on such concepts to the wireless marketplace. The approaches range from "switched-beam" to "fully-adaptive" with the benefits provided by the various approaches differing accordingly. At the fully-adaptive end of the spectrum is spatial division multiple access (SDMA) technology which employs antenna arrays and multi-dimensional nonlinear signal processing techniques to provide significant increases in capacity and quality of many wireless communication systems. SDMA technology is especially well-suited to the deployment of the current and next generation cellular systems, termed the personal communications service (PCS) and the wireless local loop (WLL).