European Smart Antenna test-bed - Field trial results

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.