There is still an open debate within the research community regarding the l
ikely performance enhancement of smart antennas versus their complexity for
commercial wireless applications. The goal of the study presented in this
paper is to investigate the performance improvement attainable using relati
vely, simple smart antenna techniques when applied to the third-generation
W-CDMA air interface. Methods to achieve this goal include fixed multibeam
architectures with different beam selection algorithms (maximum power crite
rion, combined beams) or adaptive solutions driven by relatively simple dir
ection finding algorithms, After comparing these methods against each other
for several representative scenarios, some issues related to the sensitivi
ty of these methods are also studied, (e.g., robustness to environment, mis
matches originating from implementation limitations, etc.). Results indicat
e that overall, conventional beamforming seems to be the best choice in ter
ms of balancing the performance and complexity requirements, in particular
when the problem with interfering high-bit-rate W-CDMA users is considered.