An SDMA system based on spatial covariances

The aim of SDMA is the channel reuse within a mobile radio cell through spatial filtering techniques exploiting the different directions of arrival (DOAs) of the user signals. The performance of high-resolution DOA estimation algorithms may suffer from model errors introduced by diffuse multipath propagation. We present a robust SDMA system concept based on the estimation of spatial covariance matrices rather than of DOAs, therefore being immune to phenomena like diffuse multipath and/or high angular spread.