Space hopping scheme under short range Rician multipath fading environment

An array antenna system requires the same number of RF circuit sections as that of the antennas. This paper presents the novel concept of “space hopping” scheme which requires only “one” RF circuit to enable the array antenna system at very low cost. The scheme also shows excellent BER characteristics for the array antenna system. We focus on the improvement of BER in the array antenna configuration in the short range Rician distribution multipath fading environment. A multipath simulation bench is studied and designed to evaluate the space hopping performance. Several simulations are made to confirm the expected performance of the space hopping scheme and to obtain a good configuration of the array antenna