Analysis of handset antenna performance in a multipath environment

Performance of a cellular telephone antenna is an important issue, due to its impact on the entire wireless system. Antenna performance is best characterized by its effective gain which is the ratio of the received power to that of a lossless isotropic antenna. Effective gain of mobile antennas has to be evaluated taking into account antenna efficiency, human operator effects, handset position in space, and the particular type of propagation environment. Antenna effective gain along with correlation between antennas determines antenna diversity performance as well. This paper gives a brief description of the simulation method, a model, and results used to evaluate performance of several commonly used handset antenna configurations.