Performance Analysis of Maximal Ratio Combining of Spatially Filtered Signals

Using multiple receive antennas, some uncorrelated versions of the transmitted signal can be gathered and combined to enhance the system performance. In this case, receive antennas are apart enough to ensure statistically uncorrelated receptions. Whereas, the performance improvement using beamforming antennas usually requires small antenna spacing so that the signals received at from all antennas should be correlated and coherent. This paper discovers and verifies the fact that both beamforming and diversity gains can be simultaneously obtained using array antenna composed of antenna elements linearly spaced out half-wavelength.