There is still an open debate within the research community regarding the likely 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 relatively 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 criterion, combined beams) or adaptive solutions driven by relatively simple direction finding algorithms. After comparing these methods against each other for several representative scenarios, some issues related to the sensitivity of these methods are also studied, (e.g., robustness to environment, mismatches originating from implementation limitations, etc.). Results indicate that overall, conventional beamforming seems to be the best choice in terms of balancing the performance and complexity requirements, in particular when the problem with interfering high-bit-rate W-CDMA users is considered.
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