The European Commission, through RACE, ACTS and now the IST programmes; has
funded numerous consortium based research projects addressing capacity enh
ancement by means of Smart or Adaptive Antenna Technology. In addition to c
apacity enhancement, these projects have also considered the additional ope
rational benefits; such as multipath mitigation and range extension, that t
his technology can offer to wireless network deployments. This paper provid
es an overview of the results obtained from the test-bed and field trial ev
aluations conducted under the ACTS TSUNAMI project. Here, a test-bed facili
ty was developed by the project partners in order to appraise the potential
merits of a Smart antenna facet deployment at the base-station cell site o
f a DCS1800 network. Details of the test-bed hardware and adaptive control
algorithms are given, as well as results from the user tracking, traffic be
arer quality assessments and range extension experiments. These results hel
p substantiate many of the claims put forward by the proponents of Smart an
tenna technology, as well as ranking the relative performance of the family
of adaptive control algorithms evaluated here. Further. new research activ
ities, which embody Smart Antenna Technology; now supported under IST fundi
ng are also introduced.