Impact of wideband directional propagation channel characteristics on adaptive beamforming

Adaptive beamforming, using the Conjugate Gradient Normal Equation Residual problem, is applied to a base station array, in the UTRA-TDD up-link. A Wideband Directional Channel Model is used, characterising specific micro-cell, street-type scenarios. These differ in the number of mobile terminals, grouped and placed along the street axis, and on their distances to the base station. Time- and angle-of-arrival spreads, and on-the-air interference content are the main parameters inherently varied and analysed. The average beamforming gain and signal-to-noise ratio are evaluated, also varying the number of array elements. The high number of arriving correlated and closely correlated signals, together with the composed nature of the correlation matrix in the algorithm's cost function, result in that other than the MMSE solutions may lead to the best interference suppression, for the tested scenarios. Among the several weighted interfering power components, the most relevant is due to the delayed signals from all the other links. The combination of the number of arriving orthogonal codes, time-of-arrival and angle-of-arrival spreads condition beamforming performance: the number of array elements affect performance, depending on the mobile terminal distance to the base station, and on the number of active links; for short distances and large number of users, larger time-of-arrival spread degrades beamformer performance, over the opposing effect of angle-of-arrival spread; the number of active users affects beamforming gain especially in the case that delay spreads are larger, i.e., for shorter mobile terminal distances to the base station.