Planning a third generation mobile network with adaptive antennas

To date, research on adaptive antennas has been focused on the link performance, disregarding the network issues. The development of planning models and procedures fitted to adaptive antennas into the STORMS tool allows, for the first time, to assess the impact of adaptive antennas from a network deployment perspective. This capability has in fact been exploited in conducting three different planning exercises for different configurations of deployment of adaptive antennas. The analysis of the network designs achieved as compared to the design corresponding to conventional antennas highlight the cellular improvements granted by the use of adaptive antennas.