Performance of an adaptive antenna system in EGPRS networks

The ever growing demand for mobile communications is pushing the technology towards its very limits. In addition, the current technology is optimized for circuit-switched voice rather than bandwidth hungry services such as wireless Internet and multimedia applications. The third generation mobile systems that will be introduced in the near future are designed specifically to address these limitations. In this paper, we focus on EGPRS, the evolutionary path for the GSM and the TDMA IS-136 systems to provide third generation packet-switched services. We outline a simulation methodology which can be used to evaluate the system level performance of EGPRS for an adaptive antenna system. We then show, via simulations, that the use of the adaptive antenna system can significantly enhance the quality of service and the network capacity of EGPRS. For example, a capacity gain of over 200% can be achieved for the 1/3 frequency reuse scheme.