Investigation into GPRS Transmission Employing Switched Beam Antenna at Mobile Station

In last few years, a smart antenna has been envisaged to enhance the GPRS system implementing at Base Station. This results in the problem of complexity and expense. Alternatively, this paper considers employing switched beam antenna at Mobile Station, such as Laptop, instead. The simulation results reveal that utilizing switched beam antenna provides higher performance in term of C/I and throughput compared with using existing antenna. As being spaced by half-wavelength of the operational frequency, the array size is too large to build in Laptop. On the other hand, the reduction of array spacing affects the system throughput because of mutual coupling effect. Also, the decoupling techniques proposed in literatures are not practical for implementing in Mobile Station. Therefore, this paper also presents the trade off between throughput and array size. From the obtained results, we can reduce the array spacing according to the desired throughput. This is considerably useful for the GPRS designer.