Link level performance of EDGE with adaptive antenna systems

GSM has grown to dominate the world cellular market from its humble beginnings about a decade ago. In parallel with that, the number of world cellular subscribers is growing at an astonishing rate. To meet the increasing demand for network capacity, network operators and suppliers alike are investigating different measures to satisfy the demand. One measure calls for the use of adaptive antenna systems. Apart from its ability to alleviate network congestion in existing systems, the adaptive antenna system concept is expected to be an enabling technology in third generation cellular systems. We investigate the link performance of EDGE for a fixed multibeam adaptive antenna system. In particular, we evaluate and compare the performance of different adaptive antenna system receiver configurations in the spatial dimension under the realistic COST259 channel model.