Reduced-Complexity Radio Architectures for Enhanced Receive Selection Combining in Multiuser Diversity Systems

Although antenna selection is a simple and efficient technique for enhancing the downlink performance of multiuser diversity systems, the large antenna interelement spacing required for achieving spatial diversity is prohibitive for user terminals due to size restrictions. In order to allay this problem, we propose miniaturized switched beam receiver designs assisted by low-cost passive reflectors. Unlike conventional spatial receive diversity systems, the proposed angular diversity architectures occupy a small volume whereas the antenna system properties are optimized by controlling the strong reactive fields present at small dimensions. The systems are designed for maximum antenna efficiency and low interbeam correlation, thus yielding N practically uncorrelated receive diversity branches. The simulation results show that the proposed enhanced diversity combining systems improve the average throughput of a multiuser network outperforming classical antenna selection especially for small user populations and compact user terminal size.