Switched beam antennas performance evaluation and capacity increase for UMTS systems

New mobile communication services are appearing, and the rate of demand is rapidly increasing. New technologies are needed to give service to the higher number of users with the minimum of spectrum requirements. One of these technologies is the dynamic reconfiguration of the antenna radiation pattern at the base station site. Although this technique can be applied to TDMA and FDMA systems, the main improvement is obtained when using CDMA. These antenna systems pretend to minimize the interference power received from non-desired users, and maximize C/I values. This paper presents simulation results obtained for the vehicular scenario of W-CDMA UMTS macrocellular systems using switched beam antenna technology. Performance improvement obtained with respect to 120° three-sectorial antenna systems is shown. Both intracell and out-of-cell interference are calculated, and user mobility is taken into account in the simulator