Antenna diversity for mobile terminals

Antenna diversity has been used at the base station in mobile communications as a way to reduce the impact of multipath fading for many years. At present, network operators in the Far East have also implemented antenna diversity at the mobile and it is likely that with upcoming third generation and fourth generation mobile networks this will become more common. Despite being already used, the mechanisms for successful diversity antennas at the mobile are largely unstudied and how their performance can be optimised is not well understood. Therefore there is a need for a new method from which the designer can evaluate the diversity performance of mobile antennas and use the results to determine how they are performing. This thesis presents a new diversity modelling technique that can be used to evaluate the main antenna diversity contributions at a mobile terminal namely spatial, polarisation and angular diversity. Many mobile terminals will consist of a combination of all three and so evaluating them will assist the designer to find why there is diversity. Further to this it will present simulations that show how the results should be interpreted correctly for the benefit of the designer. Optimising the efficiency as well as the diversity is an important factor at the mobile, which will also be considered. Results are also presented for two case study applications of the evaluation method. The first is a typical mobile handset with a diversity antenna and the other examines the diversity potential of an Intelligent Quadrifilar Helix Antenna. Finally the thesis ends with a proposal for a mobile fading environment simulator to verify the diversity performance of mobile handsets with different angle of arrival enviromnents that will be of benefit in the future.

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