Beam diversity simulations in microcellular environment

Diversity antennas are widely used in improving the quality of the radio channel between a mobile hand-held telephone and a base station. The motivation of the present study is to investigate the possibility of using a small antenna array in a base station to provide beam diversity that is a promising technique to overcome severe fading problems met in urban microcells. Diversity gain associated with two different array excitations has been computed using a ray propagation model in an urban environment. The obtained results show that the fading holes associated with the independent antenna beams do not coincide. Hence, using an array with two independent element excitation stages provides a means to obtain diversity gain.