On Base Station Antenna Beamwidth for Sectorized WCDMA Systems

The radiation pattern of a base station antenna in WCDMA networks is an important system design parameter since it has a strong influence on the interference distribution in the network. In this paper we study the problem of finding the azimuth beamwidth which optimizes system performance. We find the optimal beamwidth under a wide range of operating conditions for networks with 3 or 6 sectors per site. In particular, we investigate how the optimal beamwidth is affected by network irregularities and various environmental and system design parameters. The optimization problem is shown to be robust in the sense that a fairly large interval of beamwidths gives near-optimal performance.