Estimation of the scattering radius around a mobile handset using a sub-space technique

There have been a number of attempts to use experimental data to obtain estimates of the scattering radius of scatterers around transmitters in cellular radio systems. This paper presents a new method of estimating the scattering radius using a linear array antenna at the receiver. The method is based on a sub-space technique for estimating the angle of arrival of the received signals. The new method exploits the decorrelation of the received signal across the multiple antenna elements of a linear array antenna to estimate the angular spread. The concept of the new method is developed and its performance is verified for an eight element antenna array using a Monte-Carlo simulation of a DCS1800 system for two different scattering models. One is a uniform disk of scatterers and the other is a random distribution of scatterers.