Performance prediction of smart antennas in micro- and pico-cellular propagation environments

A new expression for SINR for systems using antenna arrays and adaptive beamforming at the base station of cellular systems has been derived. The common assumption of grouping multipaths arriving in the same bin to a single path has been relaxed in this work. In fact, we have treated sub-paths separately. Our results confirm that even in the presence of noncoherent multipath, an improvement proportional to the number of antenna elements is achievable, but it strongly depends on the distribution of the users and scatterers in the medium. Simulation results from our site-specific radiowave propagation model are presented which show that for micro- and pico-cellular environments multipath in the same bin may not be correlated as they have widely separated DOA's.