Array performance in a distributed fading environment

The performance of an antenna array in a distributed fading environment depends on how the signal gets distributed in space. An estimator which makes use of the knowledge of the spatial distribution of the signal is proposed, and compared with other estimates where either this knowledge is not available, or only an estimate of it is available. As the signal gets spread more in space, the value of this information is reduced, until for the case of isotropic scattering the estimate which uses the spatial distribution is equivalent to the estimate which does not. We derive the approximate theoretic performance of the array as a function of both angular spread and input SNR. Performance results are presented that compare the performance of the different estimators, as well as the proposed theoretic performance, as a function of input SNR.