A smart antenna model incorporating an azimuthal dispersion of received signals at the base station of a CDMA system

The use of smart or adaptive array antennas has attracted considerable interest in the mobile communications community. We investigate the combined use of an adaptive/smart array antenna and Rake receiver (space-time processing) to jointly mitigate the effect of multiple access interference (MAI) and multipath fading in a CDMA system, while taking angle spread into account. We provide simulation results concerning mean bit error rate (BER) performance of such a system for different numbers of antenna elements, numbers of users and angle spreads. The obtained results show that the investigated smart antenna system can effectively combat adverse MAI and fading effects and improve the CDMA system performance.