Applications of space-time adaptive processing in wireless communications

Abstract

This paper studies the application of space-time adaptive processing (STAP) to increase the performance of wireless communications. STAP applied to CDMA systems is an efficient means to increase the capacity by providing diversity paths to combat multipath and by suppressing interference through spatial-temporal filtering. STAP may also be used to harden commercial systems for military applications by rejecting narrowband interferences in overlay situations. The main advantage of interference suppression in the spatial domain is its robustness with respect to the interference bandwidth. The performance of several STAP architectures is reviewed. The performance of wireless systems with array processing or STAP is degraded by errors in the estimation of the covariance matrix due to finite sample effects. Full and reduced-rank methods are analyzed with respect to their robustness to finite sample effects.