Reverse link capacity and coverage improvement for CDMA cellular systems using polarization and spatial diversity

This paper explores the benefits of increased diversity order using spatially separated, polarized antennas at the base station receiver of a CDMA cellular system. Field tests are conducted in real mobile wireless environments. A conventional dual diversity receiver is compared with one that implements four-way diversity combining using spatially separated cross-polarized antennas. Several measured quantities are logged at the base station receiver and the mobile transmitter during a packet data connection at fixed data rate. Existing published results that explore polarization diversity focus on correlation measurements between received signal polarization components. The emphasis of the present study is to quantify reverse link capacity and coverage improvements for a CDMA cellular network as a result of exploiting polarization as an additional source of diversity at the base station receiver.