Experimental evaluation of smart antenna system performance for wireless communications

In wireless communications, smart antenna systems (or antenna arrays) can be used to suppress multipath fading with antenna diversity and to increase the system capacity by supporting multiple co-channel users in reception and transmission. This paper presents experimental results of diversity gain, interference cancellation, and mitigation of multipath fading obtained by using a smart antenna system in typical wireless scenarios. Also given are experimental results for the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of two moving users, comparing different beamforming algorithms in typical wireless scenarios. All of the experiments were performed using the 900-MHz smart antenna testbed at The University of Texas at Austin.