Impact of arrival angle spread of each cluster of irresolvable paths on adaptive antenna array and antenna diversity in DS-CDMA mobile radio

Adaptive antenna array is a promising technique to increase the link capacity in mobile radio communications systems by suppressing multiple access interference (MAI). In the mobile radio, the received signal consists of discrete paths, each being a cluster of many irresolvable paths arriving from different directions. For large arrival angle spread of each cluster of irresolvable paths, antenna array cannot form a beam pattern that sufficiently suppresses MAI even in the presence of single interference signal and hence, the transmission performance may degrade. In this situation, the use of antenna diversity may be a better solution. It is an interesting question as to which can achieve a better performance, antenna diversity reception or adaptive antenna array. In this letter, we study the impact of the arrival angle spread on the DS-CDMA transmission performances achievable with adaptive antenna array and antenna diversity reception. It is pointed out that the arrival angle spread is an important parameter to determine the performances of adaptive antenna array and antenna diversity.