The impact of antenna diversity on the capacity of wireless communication systems

For a broad class of interference-dominated wireless systems including mobile, personal communications, and wireless PBX/LAN networks, the authors show that a significant increase in system capacity can be achieved by the use of spatial diversity (multiple antennas), and optimum combining. This is explained by the following observation: for independent flat-Rayleigh fading wireless systems with N mutually interfering users, they demonstrate that with K+N antennas, N-1 interferers can be nulled out and K+1 path diversity improvement can be achieved by each of the N users. Monte Carlo evaluations show that these results also hold with frequency-selective fading when optimum equalization is used at the receiver. Thus an N-fold increase in user capacity can be achieved, allowing for modular growth and improved performance by increasing the number of antennas. The interferers can also be users in other cells, users in other radio systems, or even other types of radiating devices, and thus interference cancellation also allows radio systems to operate in high interference environments. As an example of the potential system gain, the authors show that with 2 or 3 antennas the capacity of the mobile radio system IS-54 can be doubled, and with 5 antennas a 7-fold capacity increase (frequency reuse in every cell) can be achieved.< >