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Mark BEACH Chris SIMMONDS Paul HOWARD Peter DARWOOD
The European Commission, through RACE, ACTS and now the IST programmes, has funded numerous consortium based research projects addressing capacity enhancement by means of Smart or Adaptive Antenna Technology. In addition to capacity enhancement, these projects have also considered the additional operational benefits, such as multipath mitigation and range extension, that this technology can offer to wireless network deployments. This paper provides an overview of the results obtained from the test-bed and field trial evaluations conducted under the ACTS TSUNAMI project. Here, a test-bed facility 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 of a DCS1800 network. Details of the test-bed hardware and adaptive control algorithms are given, as well as results from the user tracking, traffic bearer quality assessments and range extension experiments. These results help substantiate many of the claims put forward by the proponents of Smart antenna technology, as well as ranking the relative performance of the family of adaptive control algorithms evaluated here. Further, new research activities, which embody Smart Antenna Technology, now supported under IST funding are also introduced.