Smart antenna systems for wireless communications

With the exponentially increasing demand for wireless communications, the capacity of current cellular systems will soon become incapable of handling the growing traffic. Since radio frequencies are diminishing natural resources, there seems to be a fundamental barrier to further capacity increase. Smart antenna systems were proposed to open up another resource, i.e., space, to provide a significant increase of channel capacity and solving or mitigating the aforementioned problems. This paper briefly summarizes the research results on smart antenna systems obtained at The University of Texas at Austin and future challenges in this promising area.