Cylindrical Antenna Arrays for WCDMA Downlink Capacity Enhancement

Advanced antenna arrays at the base stations are one of the key techniques to improve the downlink capacity of WCDMA cellular systems. Traditionally, linear and circular arrays are used to form the beams. In this paper, cylindrical antenna arrays with various types of input excitations are proposed, and the beam steering adaptive antenna technique is considered. The user capacity per cell among the linear, circular, and cylindrical arrays is presented and compared in a simulation environment supporting various types of adaptive antennas, soft/softer handover, and multiple services. A notable superiority of the proposed cylindrical antenna arrays was demonstrated by the simulation results.