Experimental study of antenna arrays in indoor wireless applications

A spatial signature is the response vector of an antenna array to a mobile unit at a certain location. The mobile subscribers at different locations exhibit different spatial signatures. The exploitation of spatial diversity (or difference of spatial signatures) is the basic idea of the so-called space-division-multiple-access (SDMA) scheme, which can be used to significantly increase the channel capacity and quality and combat multipath fading in a wireless communication system. The purpose of this paper is to describe indoor experiments conducted with our antenna array (or smart antenna) testbed to study the vector channel propagation characteristics in various indoor scenarios. The results to be presented include indoor DOA angle spread and spatial signature variation due to terminal displacement. The experimental results show the rich spatial diversity and potential benefits of using an antenna array for indoor wireless applications, such as wireless local area networks (LANs).