An adaptive antenna for spatial-domain path-diversity

High-speed TDMA mobile communications suffer from frequency-selective fading due to multipath propagation. Also, the energy per bit is lower because the symbol duration is short. We need a scheme which reduces the frequency-selective fading and utilizes transmitted power efficiently. This paper presents a new configuration of an adaptive antenna for path-diversity in high-speed mobile communications. The adaptive antenna has several weight vectors which resolve multipath signals in the spatial-domain. The resolved multipath signals are combined equalizing the delay difference. Thus, the frequency-selective fading is suppressed and we can utilize the signal power efficiently. We carried out computer simulations under several scenarios. It is shown that the proposed adaptive antenna reveals a good path-diversity performance.