Adaptive array sensor processing applications for mobile telephone communications

Abstract

The mobile telephone cellular communication system is rapidly being saturated with an increase in subscribers. Although advanced coding and modulation techniques as well as different cell cluster architectures have been implemented, a great increase in the channel capacity is needed, especially in large markets. Adaptive sensor processing has been introduced as a possible remedy to increase the channel capacity by using the directional sensitivity, which leads to a reduction of the interference. Some high-resolution algorithms are evaluated for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for a cellular mobile radio environment whose cluster size is varied from K=7, K=4, and K=3; more signals and scattering scenarios that typically arise in urban areas are taken into account. This information is used to beamform toward the signal of interest, resulting in a decrease of the interference. Several signal estimation procedures are evaluated and compared, and it is observed that the DOAs, among other benefits, leads to even higher performance compared with the reference signal method. The computational aspects for the different signal processing, detection and estimation schemes are also discussed.