The capacity of wireless communication systems can be substantially increased by the use of antenna diversity

For a broad class of interference-dominated wireless systems including mobile, personal communications, and wireless PBX/LAN networks, the authors show that a significant increase in system capacity can be achieved by the use of spatial diversity (multiple antennas), and optimum combining. This is explained by the following observation: for independent flat-Rayleigh fading wireless systems with N mutually interfering users, it is demonstrated that with K+N antennas, N-1 interferers can be nulled out and K+1 path diversity improvement can be achieved by each of the N users. Monte Carlo evaluations show that these results also hold with frequency selective fading when optimum equalization is used at the receiver. Thus an N-fold increase in user capacity can be achieved, allowing for modular growth and improved performance by increasing the number of antennas.<
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