Chebyshev antenna arrays for WCDMA downlink capacity enhancement

Advanced antenna arrays at the base stations are one of the key techniques to improve the downlink capacity of WCDMA cellular systems. Typically, uniform linear arrays and uniform circular arrays are used to form the beams. In this work, we propose the use of Chebyshev antenna arrays which are linear arrays with non-uniform input excitations. We consider two adaptive antenna schemes: fixed beam and steered beam. For each scheme, we compare the user capacity per cell among the three different types of antenna arrays (uniform linear, Chebyshev linear, and uniform circular). The adopted simulation environment supports various types of adaptive antennas, soft/softer handover, and multiple services. Results demonstrate a notable superiority of the proposed Chebyshev antenna arrays.