Analysis of the spectral efficiency of a fully adaptive antenna array system in GSM/DCS networks

The fast increasing number of subscribers in mobile communication networks leads towards the investigation of methods for capacity enhancement of existing systems. GSM/DCS networks provide a number of already available features (frequency hopping-FH, power control-PC, discontinuous transmission-DTX) to reduce interference and therefore to increase capacity by means of a reduction of the frequency reuse factor. Methods based on smart antenna receivers have been under investigation to further enhance the spectral efficiency with the least impact on the actual hardware structures. A new adaptive space-time receiver has been proposed (Giancola et al., 1999) to cope with time varying channel and co-channel interference. Here we propose a complete study to evaluate the additional capacity gain of the proposed smart antenna system compared to other array systems in a modern fully-featured GSM/DCS network.