Known and novel diversity approaches as a powerful means to enhance the performance of cellular mobile radio systems

The main requirements to be met by third generation mobile radio systems are high cellular spectrum efficiency and high flexibility. The authors focus on high cellular spectrum efficiency, which is difficult to achieve due to the time variance and frequency selectivity of the mobile radio channel and due to interference. It is known that the degrading effects of these adverse characteristics of the mobile radio channel and of interference can be mitigated by diversity. The way how diversity influences cellular spectrum efficiency is derived in general. As a reference point, the types of diversity used in GSM are analyzed. In GSM, the potential for diversity enhancement inherent in code-division multiple-access (CDMA) is not exploited. A joint detection code-division multiple-access (JD-CDMA) system concept aimed at third generation mobile radio systems has been proposed which introduces a CDMA feature into systems based on time-division multiple-access (TDMA) and frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) like GSM and also advanced TDMA (ATDMA). The gains achievable by different types of diversity in GSM as well as in the JD-CDMA system concept are investigated. It is shown that considerable gains can be achieved by different types of antenna diversity and by exploiting the additional diversity potential of CDMA. Therefore, third generation standards should be flexible in order to allow the use of as many types of diversity as possible to enhance the cellular spectrum efficiency.