Combined effect of coherent adaptive antenna array diversity and SINR-based fast transmit power control in W-CDMA reverse link

This paper evaluates through laboratory and field experiments the combined effect of the coherent adaptive antenna array diversity (CAAAD) receiver and signal-to-interference plus background noise ratio (SINR)-based fast transmit power control (TPC) in order to improve performance beyond that of space diversity (SD) with maximal ratio combining (MRC) in all low-to-high signal-to-interference power ratio (SIR) channels in the W-CDMA reverse link. Although the previously proposed CAAAD receiver comprising an adaptive antenna array based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion and a coherent Rake combiner was very effective in suppressing interference in low SIR (interference is severe) channels, SD employing MRC in noise limited channels (high SIR) outperformed the CAAAD because of its uncorrelated reception of fading variation due to its large antenna separation. The laboratory experimental results showed that the required average transmit signal energy per bit-to-background noise spectrum density (E_b/N_O) with the CAAAD receiver using fast TPC is lower than that with an SD receiver over a wide range of maximum Doppler frequency values from f_D = 5 Hz to 500 Hz in a low-to-high SIR channel. The results of the field experiments also showed that combining CAAAD and fast TPC is a powerful means to reduce severe multiple access interference (MAI) from high rate users in a low-to-high SIR environment and is more effective than using the SD receiver with the same number of antennas, i.e., the measured BER was improved by approximately one order of magnitude, when the relative transmit power of the desired user was 8 dB with two antennas at the average received SIR at the antenna input of -12 dB.