WP-ISA-031502-2.

IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

ArrayComm, Incorporated 2480 North First Street San Jose, CA 95131 USA Main Number: +1 408.428.9080 whitepapers@arraycomm.com www.arraycomm.com

IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

Contents
Introduction .................................................................. 3 1. Basic Cellular Architecture ........................................ 3 2. Coverage ................................................................... 5 3. Spectral Efficiency..................................................... 5 4. The Quest for better Coverage and Spectral Efficiency7 5. IntelliCell: The Fully Adaptive Smart Antenna Approach....................................................................... 8 6. System-Level Benefits of IntelliCell......................... 11 7. IntelliCell Architecture ............................................ 16 8. Conclusion............................................................... 17

IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

INTRODUCTION
Cellular communications has reached mass-market status over the past decade with the emergence of two very successful standards: CDMA and GSM. Over this same decade, an important enabling technology, smart antennas, has also matured. Combined with todays powerful, low-cost processors, advanced smart antenna technology is destined to become an important part of the cellular landscape over the next decade. Smart antenna systems utilize multiple antennas at base stations or handsets to better pinpoint or focus radio energy and thereby improve signal quality. Since cellular communications systems employ radio signals that interact with the environment and each other, these improvements in signal quality lead to system-wide benefits with respect to coverage, service quality and, ultimately, the economics of cellular service. To some extent, the phrase smart antennas is misleading. There is nothing smart about the antennas themselves. Whats smart is the sophisticated signal processing applied to simultaneous signals from an array or collection of multiple antennas. For nearly a decade, ArrayComm has been at the forefront of developing smart antenna techniques and intellectual property for commercial cellular systems. IntelliCell is the name for these techniques and intellectual property. Thru eight years of practical and field implementation, IntelliCell has been perfected to make smart antennas practical and cost effective in actual commercial cellular systems. Today, IntelliCell technology is deployed in more than 90,000 commercial base station deployments worldwide.

1. BASIC CELLULAR ARCHITECTURE

Cellular networks are composed of geographically separated base stations connected to a backbone network, with each base station serving an area called a cell. (See Figure 1.) In some systems, cells are further subdivided into sectors, for reasons that will be described later in this document. The range of each base station may be anywhere from 0.5 km to 15 km, with 1-3 km as the typical range in digital cellular systems. Handsets communicate with a nearby base station via radio signals. The information, voice or data, is digitized prior to transmission in all modern cellular systems. In the United States, most commercial cellular systems operate in licensed radio frequencies in the region of either 850 MHz or 1.9 GHz. End-to-end connections with public or private data or telephony networks are made possible by a backhaul network that connects all of the base stations to a switching/routing function, which directs users voice or data transmissions to and from their correspondents. Note that this same network architecture is used for many types of wireless services, including wireless LANs and point-to-multipoint data services such as LMDS.

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IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

Figure 1: Basic Cellular Architecture

base station cell

sector

Telephony Networks Backhaul Network Switching/ Routing Data Networks

In the radio portion of the network, the uplink refers to the communication from the handset up to the base station: The handset or user terminal suitably digitizes and frames voice or packet data meant for the network. This digitized data then is modulated using digital and radio circuitry and transmitted via the antenna in the handset. The antennas and circuitry at the base station receive the radio signal, demodulate it and send the users information on into the wired network. The downlink refers to the reverse direction, where the communication is from the base station down to the handset or user terminal. The base station suitably digitizes and frames voice or packet data meant for the subscriber. This digitized data is modulated using digital and radio circuitry and is transmitted via the antennas at the base station. The antenna and circuitry at the handset receive the radio signal, demodulate it and send the information on to the subscriber. This type of cellular architecture has gained wide acceptance as the most economical and flexible architecture for delivering mass-market personal wireless services. The decline of satellite based systems such as Iridium and Globalstar into niche services has proved this point. Nevertheless, looking forward, cellular systems face a significant challenge as data services and bandwidth become important. The challenge is to improve the quality of the communication channel to handle larger traffic loads while maintaining the same cost structure, despite the scarcity and exorbitant prices of additional spectrum. This challenge is exacerbated by the expected trend away from todays low-data-rate digital voice services toward high-data-rate broadband services. Todays cellular systems will require a 10-fold to 40-fold increase in spectral efficiency and capacity to affordably deliver true Internet content.

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IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

2. COVERAGE
The base station range (cell area) determines the number of base stations required for a particular coverage area in the early days of deployment, when subscriber density is low. It is, therefore, one of the key determinants of system economics. When radio energy propagates in a cellular environment, the received signal level degrades as the distance between transmitter and receiver increases. This received signal has to exceed the inherent noise level in the radio receiver by a certain margin in order to be successfully demodulated. The ratio of the received signal level and this noise is called the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Cellular systems are deployed with a certain average or nominal SNR target. Everything else being equal, a higher nominal SNR translates into a higher possible data rate but at the cost of reduced base station range. For example, GSM systems are typically rolled out so that nominal SNRs are approximately 9 dB; while CDMA systems operate at nominal SNRs of 10 dB. (CDMA systems operate at these much lower SNRs by introducing large redundancy into transmitted data through a process known as spreading. In practice, the range of a CDMA base station is limited more by interference among the users in the system than by receiver noise.) The challenge for next-generation cellular systems is to maintain comparable coverage footprints to second-generation cellular systems while delivering higher-data-rate service at the edge of each cell. With allocated per-user spectral resources being equal, modern information theory dictates that cell-edge data rates are determined by the received signal quality, or SNR1. However, higher SNR levels in turn require incrementally smaller cells with a correspondingly large economic implication for the service provider. Estimates show that conventionally deployed 3G base station systems will have footprints that are two to four times smaller than those of their 2G counterparts. As discussed below, smart antennas enable a fundamental improvement to these tradeoffs.

3. SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY
Besides coverage, next-generation cellular systems face another challenge related to spectral efficiency. Spectral efficiency measures the ability of a wireless system to deliver information with a given amount of radio spectrum and is directly related to system capacity. It determines the amount of radio spectrum required to provide a given service (e.g., 10 kbps voice service, 100 kbps data service) and the number of base stations required to deliver that service to the end-users. In the latter years of deployment, when subscriber penetration is high, it is, consequently, one of the primary determinants of system economics. Spectral efficiency is measured in units of bits/second per Hertz/cell (b/s/Hz/cell). It determines the total throughput each base station (cell or sector) can support in a given amount of spectrum. The appearance of a per cell dimension in measuring spectral efficiency may seem surprising, but the throughput of a particular cells base station in a cellular network is almost always substantially less than that of a single cell in isolation. This difference is attributable to self-interference generated in the network. Radio signals are unruly as compared to electrical signals propagating down wires. In a cellular system, the radio communication between a user and a base station generates radio energy thats detectable in places other than the immediate vicinity of the user, the base station and an imaginary line between the two. For other users in the vicinity, this excess energy degrades the radio channel, or makes it completely unusable for their conversations.
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IntelliCell: A Fully Adaptive Approach to Smart Antennas

As the user density increases, radio resources are thus eventually exhausted. Systems with higher spectral efficiency provide more data throughput (services) in a given amount of spectrum and support more users at a given grade of service before experiencing resource exhaustion. The key benefits of higher spectral efficiencies can be enumerated as follows: higher aggregate capacity (per-cell throughput); higher per-user quality and service levels; higher subscriber density per base station; small spectrum requirements; and lower capital and operational costs in deployment. The spectral efficiency for various systems can be calculated easily via the formula: Spectral Efficiency = (Channel Throughput/Channel Bandwidth) This simply sums the throughput over a channel in an operating network and divides by the channel bandwidth. This calculation is performed for a number of systems in Table 1. As will be discussed in later sections, the performance of IntelliCell is system dependent; however, current implementations such as ArrayComms i-BURST system have achieved spectral efficiencies of 4 bits/sec/Hz/cell. (For other systems, spectral efficiency typically is improved by a factor of 5 to 20 over those of conventional, non-smart antenna implementations.) To understand spectral efficiency calculations consider the PCS-1900 (GSM) system, which can be parameterized as follows: 200kHz carriers, 8 time slots per carrier, 13.3 kbps of user data per slot, effective reuse of 7 (i.e. effectively 7 channel groups at 100 percent network load, or only 1/7th of each channels throughput available per cell). The spectral efficiency is therefore: (8 slots x 13.3 kbps/slot) / 200 kHz / 7 reuse = 0.08 b/s/Hz/cell
Table 1 Spectral Efficiency for various common systems. The spectral efficiency of todays commercial systems is invariably about 0.1-0.2 bits/sec/Hz/cell, while systems utilizing IntelliCell technology can achieve spectral efficiencies up to 4 bits/sec/Hz/cell.

Air Interface

Carrier BW

IS95A IS95B IS95C cdma2000 GSM GSM (HSCSD) PHS Intellicell System

1.25MHz 1.25MHz 1.25MHz 5MHz 200KHz 200KHz 300KHz

Peak User Data Rate (kbps) 14.4 115 144 384 13.3 57.6 32

Average Carrier Throughput (kbps) 100 125 200 800-1,000

Spectral Efficiency 0.08 0.1 0.16 0.16-0.2 0.08 0.08 0.04 Up to 4

Comments

Source: Viterbi Source: Viterbi Source: Viterbi Source: Viterbi Reuse = 7

15.2 (13.3*8/7)
15.2 12.8

Effective reuse = 20 Depends on communication system

This value of approximately 0.1 b/s/Hz/cell is generally representative of high-mobility 2G and 3G cellular systems, including CDMA systems of all types. It reflects the fact that the classical
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techniques for increasing spectral efficiency have been exhausted and that new techniques are necessary. This will be the topic of the next section. Finally, it should be noted that the value of 0.1 b/s/Hz/cell represents a major stumbling block for the delivery of next-generation services. Without substantial increases in spectral efficiency, 3G systems are bound to spectral efficiencies like those of todays 2G systems. In a typical 3G system with a 5Mhz downlink channel block, this translates into a total cell capacity of approximately 500 kbps for the entire cell. With services advertised in the range of 144-384 kbps, 1-3 users will completely occupy the cell capacity! This is far from the approximately 250-500 subscribers per cell needed to make the system economically viable, and it underscores the need for new methods to boost spectral efficiency.

4. THE QUEST FOR BETTER COVERAGE AND SPECTRAL EFFICIENCY

A wide range of techniques and tradeoffs has been developed for enhancing coverage and spectral efficiency over the past 20 years. The most important and widely used are the following. Frequency Planning: A substantial amount of the effort in cellular systems is devoted to managing interference through the use of a reuse pattern. Traffic channels are partitioned into groups where, say, each group has one-seventh of the total radio resources, and channel groups are assigned to base stations in the network in such a way that any two cells using the same channel group are not adjacent. The resulting spatial separation ensures that the energy being used for a conversation in one cell has been sufficiently attenuated by the time it reaches another cell using the same channel that it does not pose significant interference. Reuse provides interference management, but at the expense of operational complexity and base station capacity. A given base stations channel group is a small fraction of the total system resources. Power control: Power control is a technique whereby the transmit power of a base station or handset is decreased to near the lowest allowable level that permits communication. This reduces interference levels in the network, increasing spectral efficiency. Power control is used in both GSM and CDMA systems on both the uplink and downlink. CDMA systems require particularly fast and precise power control many users share the same RF spectrum, and the system capacity is thus highly sensitive to inadequate interference control. Modulation and Coding: Modulation and coding techniques can improve the utilization of spectrum by allowing a faster throughput at a given signal quality. The benefits of any such techniques are ultimately limited, however, by the Shannon information rate. Current techniques have brought commercial systems very close to this bound, and any further spectral efficiency improvements from these techniques will be incremental, at best. Sectorization: Sectorized antenna systems take a traditional cell area and subdivide it into sectors, each covered by its own directional antenna sited at the base station location. Operationally, each sector is treated as an independent cell. Directional antennas have higher gain than omni-directional antennas, all other things being equal. Hence the range of these sectors is generally greater than that obtained with an omnidirectional antenna, roughly 35 percent greater. Sectorized cells can increase spectral efficiency by reducing the interference presented by the base station and its users to the rest of the network, and they are widely used for this purpose. Most systems in commercial service today employ three sectors per site. Although larger numbers of sectors are possible, the number of antennas and quantities of base station equipment become prohibitively expensive for most cell sites.

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The reality of all these and other standard radio techniques like them is that their benefits are, in essence, completely exploited in modern cellular systems. Further improvements in coverage and spectral efficiency from these techniques will be small and well short of the orders of magnitude needed for next-generation, broadband, wireless multimedia services. For these services, new architectures and techniques need to be employed. One such technique is the use of smart antennas such as those developed by ArrayComm for its patented IntelliCell technology.

5. INTELLICELL: THE FULLY ADAPTIVE SMART ANTENNA APPROACH

The advent of powerful, low-cost, digital processing components and the development of software-based techniques have made advanced adaptive antenna systems a practical reality for cellular communications systems: Arrays of multiple antennas, combined with digital beam-forming techniques and advanced, low-cost signal processing open a new and promising area for enhancing wireless communication systems. Terms commonly used to embrace various aspects of smart antenna system technology include intelligent antennas, phased arrays, spatial processing, digital beam forming, adaptive antenna systems, etc. ArrayComm has combined more than 8 years of practical R&D and field experience into IntelliCell, a battery of techniques and intellectual property that make smart antenna systems commercially viable. A base station utilizing IntelliCell employs a small collection (array) of simple, off-the-shelf antennas (typically 4 to 12) coupled with sophisticated signal processing to manage the energy radiated and received by the base station. This improves coverage and signal quality and mitigates interference in the network on both the uplink and the downlink. The processes on the uplink and downlink are as follows: 5.1 The IntelliCell Uplink (reception at the base station)

Typically, the received signal from each of the spatially distributed antenna elements is multiplied by a weight, a complex adjustment of amplitude and phase. These signals are combined to yield the array output. An adaptive algorithm controls the weights according to predefined objectives such as tuning in to a particular user while tuning out interference and noise. This processing is performed independently and simultaneously for each of the users being served by the base station. These dynamic calculations enable the system to tune itself for optimized signal reception: The equivalent received signal level is improved by a factor of 10log10 (number of antennas), which, for example, is 10 dB for a 10-antenna system. At the same time, interference is rejected by many orders of magnitude, anywhere from 30 to 50 dB if an interfering signal is strong enough to warrant it. This rejection and the analogous suppression on the downlink are high enough that, in TDD/TDMA implementations of IntelliCell such as in ArrayComms i-BURST, frequency planning can be done away with completely. These gains and how they relate to overall gains in signal quality are summarized in Figure 2.

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Figure 2 Effects of IntelliCell on Signal Quality. The signal level itself is enhanced while the level of interference is reduced and suppressed.

Original

Optimally Enhanced
Enhanced Signal Level

Signal

(dB)

Noise Floor

Reduced Interference

5.2

The IntelliCell Downlink (transmit from the base station)

Similar gains occur on the downlink. The signals to be transmitted are multiplied by weighting factors of different amplitude and phase for each antenna. The weighting factors are chosen dynamically to ensure that the transmitted signals constructively combine and add at the user of interest while at the same time presenting no interference to other co-channel users2. The weight factors are again chosen dynamically based on predefined objectives. These dynamic calculations enable the system to tune itself for optimized signal transmission: the equivalent transmitted-power signal level is a factor of 20log10 (number of antennas) over the power emitted by a single antenna at the base station. This is, for example, 20dB for a 10antenna system. This is a monumental improvement in equivalent signal level. Because the signals constructively interfere at the targeted user, for example, 10 1-Watt transmitters at the base station produce an equivalent incident radiation as a single, 100W transmitter. In addition, the redundancy introduced through the use of multiple transmitting elements, combined with the reduction in power amplifier size, increases the base station reliability. Smaller-power amplifiers are more reliable and less expensive than larger ones, and the loss of a single transmitting element from the array has only a small effect on base station downlink performance (as opposed to the case where the base station has only a single radiating element). At the same time, interference is mitigated by 30 to 40 dB if a nearby user (interferer) is close enough to the base station to warrant it. An important point here is that the type and performance of the downlink processing used depends on whether the communication system uses time division duplex (TDD) schemes, which transmit and receive on the same frequency (e.g., 802.11, PHS and DECT) or frequency division duplex (FDD) schemes, which use separate frequencies for transmit and receiving (e.g., GSM, EDGE, W-CDMA, cdma2000). In most FDD systems, fading and other propagation characteristics are uncorrelated from the uplink radio channel to the downlink one, whereas in
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TDD systems, the uplink and downlink channels can be considered reciprocal. Hence, in TDD systems, uplink channel information may be used to achieve spatially selective transmission. In FDD systems, the uplink channel information cannot be used directly, and other types of downlink processing must be considered. 5.3 Some Simple Math

Conceptually, all this works as in the simple model shown in Figure 3. Imagine a simple, twoantenna base station attempting to communicate to two users, User A and User B, on the same channel. Also imagine that since the signals from these users travel along different paths to the base station, they arrive in the following combinations at the antenna array: User A Signal at the base station: (+A, +A) User B Signal at the base station: (+B, -B) Note the difference is these signatures: User As signals arrive in phase between the two antennas and user Bs signals arrive out of phase between the two antennas. These signatures are commonly referred to as spatial signatures. In a real-world implementation, these signatures are vectors in an M-dimensional complex space, where M is the number of antennas. These signals arrive together at the base station and combine to become: Base Station Received Signal: (+A + B, +A - B) Now, very simply, in order for the base station to extract user As signal from the interference caused by user B, it simply adds the two signals with weight factors (1,1): Extract User A: (+1, +1) (+A + B, +A - B) = (+A +B) + (+A B) = 2A and similarly for user B, the weight vector (+1, -1) is used: Extract User B: (+1, -1) (+A + B, +A - B) = (+A +B) - (+A B) = 2B

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Figure 3 Simple Model of Adaptive Antennas. Users signals arrive with different relative phases and amplitudes at the array. Weights are applied in order to extract the signals for particular users.

User A

User B

A+B

A-B

+1

+1

-1 +1

2A

2B

In each case, by use of an appropriate weight vector, the base station is able to extract and separate the signals of user A and user B from one another while simultaneously providing gain for each! In a conventional, single-antenna system, this simple process would have been impossible, and the base station would have been left unable to decipher the two signals. Imagine a base station with only a single antenna. In this case, the received signals would be modeled as: Single Antenna Received Signal = (+A +B) and the base station is left with a confused jumble of signals from User A and User B intermixed with one another. Of course, in real-world implementations of IntelliCell, there are multiple complications that must be handled: There are more co-channel users to decipher; there are multiple other sources of interference; there are many more antennas; signal levels and phases vary across the array; and so on not to mention that the base station may not even know or have good estimates for the spatial signatures!

6. SYSTEM-LEVEL BENEFITS OF INTELLICELL

At the simplest level, IntelliCell systems fundamentally improve the coverage and spectral efficiency tradeoffs of wireless systems. Wireless system design, nevertheless, still involves a series of tradeoffs between cost, coverage and capacity. The improvements from IntelliCell

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fundamentally allow much more flexibility in system-level designs. The benefits are summarized in Table 2 and further explained in detail in this section.
Table 2 System-Level Benefits of IntelliCell

Gain

System-Level Significance

Selective Uplink Gain Receive processing at base station

Uplink Interference Mitigation Receive processing at base station

Selective Downlink Gain Transmit strategy based on uplink information and feedback from terminal Downlink Interference Mitigation Transmit strategy based on uplink information and feedback from terminal

Increased Range, Coverage, Link budget 10*log10(M) gain 13dB 17dB diversity gain Lower terminal transmit power Uplink multipath immunity Lower-complexity equalization Improved Signal Quality Robust to interference from multiple uplink interferers 30dB 40dB interference immunity Higher spectral efficiency Increased Range, Coverage, Link budget 20*log10(M) gain 13dB 17dB diversity gain Reduced base station PA sizing Reduced downlink multipath Lower-complexity equalization at terminal Improved Signal Quality Automatically reduces signal transmission to cochannel interference Increases system-wide downlink signal quality 30dB 40dB interference immunity Higher spectral efficiency

6.1

Selective Uplink Gain: 10log10(M)

As mentioned before, IntelliCell significantly improves uplink link budgets by a factor of the number of antennas. More formally, this can be seen as follows. As in the simple example above, M copies of the same signal, s, are received, one per antenna, where M is the number of antennas. Assuming that the signals arrive with the same power, an appropriate application of weights will lead to the signals adding together coherently: Uplink Received Signal After Processing = s + s + + s (There is a subtlety that has been avoided here. In reality, the signals do not arrive at the array with the same power due to fading processes that differ among the antennas. This will be discussed later in this white paper.) Similarly, after the application of the weights, the noise processes, Ni, in each of the antenna receivers add: Uplink Noise After Processing = N1 + N2 + + NM
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Since the received signals add coherently and the noise powers add independently (since the noise processes are independent and identically distributed), this leads to: Multiple Antenna Uplink SNR = (Ms) 2 / M2 = Ms2 / 2 = M (Single Antenna SNR) where s2 is the signal power, 2 is the noise power per antenna, and as before, M is the number of antennas. Taking log10 of both sides, we obtain a 10log10(M) gain in signal-to-noise ratio. With 10 antennas and under typical propagation conditions, this leads to approximately a doubling of range and quadrupling in coverage. Of course, this increase in range can be traded off against other system parameters such as the required user terminal transmit output power. 6.2 Selective Downlink Gain: 20log10(M)

A similar calculation to the above can be performed on the downlink. In the downlink case, M copies of the same signal, s, are transmitted, one per antenna. Assuming that the signals arrive with the same power, an appropriate use of the transmit weighting factors will lead to the signals adding together coherently at the handset: Downlink Received Signal at Handset = s + s + + s In this case, the receiver noise floor at the handset is independent of the antenna weightings used for base station transmit, so the multiple antenna and single antenna SNR can be compared as follows: Multiple Antenna Downlink SNR = (Ms) 2 / 2 = M2s2 / 2 = M2 (Single Antenna Downlink SNR) In contrast to the uplink gain of 10log10(M), the downlink gain is, therefore, 10log10(M2) = 20log10(M). (The extra factor of M compared to the uplink should not be surprising, since we have assumed M times more total radiated power in the multi-antenna case). For example, 10 1-Watt base station amplifiers thus perform like a single antenna with a 100W power output. This level of effective output power is often overkill in a balanced link budget. In fact, the base station radios are often wideband in an IntelliCell system in order to support the large system capacity. Such wideband radios are highly price sensitive to output power, and the 20log10(M) gain mitigates the output power requirements for these radios. As mentioned before, a significant issue in forming the downlink weights is obtaining knowledge of the downlink signature. In the uplink, the base station can employ any number of passive techniques such as using training sequences to obtain the uplink signature. In the downlink, however, the methods are highly dependent on the type of communication system employed. TDD systems have a reciprocal property in that the downlink signature is more or less proportional to the uplink signature. In FDD systems, the relation between uplink and downlink is not so simple, and a complex nonlinear mapping between the two along with other techniques based on direction of arrival or feedback from the handset is often necessary. Finally, another important complication arises because the signals received by the base station and transmitted by the base station flow through different electronic circuitry. In the simplest case, this induces a simple multiplicative transformation on spatial signatures, and in the worst case, this induces a linear or even nonlinear transformation on the signatures.
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Correcting for this effect is known as calibration, and techniques for calibration are important elements of the techniques in IntelliCell. 6.3 Selective Uplink and Downlink Gain: Diversity

All wireless systems suffer some degree of fading, which is the unavoidable consequence of reflections with short time lags constructively and destructively interfering at the receiving antenna. Since the environment is dynamic, the fades themselves are time varying. The consequence for wireless system designers is that the air interface must be robust to sudden outages (for example, using interleaving of symbols), and margins against fading must be introduced into link budgets and cell planning, which reduces coverage. In the above calculation, one simplifying step was to restrict the discussion to the non-fading case. For example, all the received signal power levels between the antennas on the uplink were assumed to be equal. In reality, the signals across the array will fade just as in a conventional single-antenna system. This fading is substantially mitigated, however, in the multiple-antenna case. When one antenna fades in the array, chances are that others do not. The output of the array is, therefore, much smoother over time. Thus, there is a reduction in the needed margin against fading, which is often referred to as a diversity gain. The calculation of this gain depends on the targeted outage probability, the detailed assumptions regarding the fading process and the number of antennas. Under a large class of assumptions, the averaging provided by the array yields reductions in the equivalent margin of 13-17 dB. It is important to note that this diversity gain is in addition to the standard 10log10(m) gain: Both the conventional, single-antenna system and the multiple-antenna system require a fading margin, but the multi-antenna system requires a much lower margin.

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Figure 5 Signals Across a 4-Antenna Array. One antenna undergoes a large fade, while the other antennas show slight variation. Though individual antennas fade in and out, the total composite signal is far more stable.

Figure 5 shows real data collected from a 4-antenna array in a suburban environment. The horizontal axis denotes a 2.5-second interval, while the vertical axis indicates the power level. Each of the lower curves shows the power levels for each antenna, respectively, while the upper curve denotes the composite power. The composite power is simply the power level obtained after applying appropriate weights via IntelliCell processing. The individual antennas in the array fade in and out independently. As illustrated, the total composite power is far more stable. A conventional single-antenna system would need provisions and margins against the deeper fades exhibited by a single antenna, while an IntelliCell system requires a far smaller margin. It is interesting that the common industry practice is to ignore such fading margins in published link budgets such as those for CDMA and GSM. However, fading is a very real effect that must be accounted for in the planning of real cellular systems. A testament to this is that most cellular systems employ two receive diversity antennas on the uplink at the base station. (Together with a single downlink antenna, this yields the characteristic 3-antenna-per-sector configuration most common today.)

6.4

Uplink and Downlink Interference Mitigation

The uplink and downlink interference mitigation provided by IntelliCell processing is perhaps the most remarkable of the system benefits. In practical implementations, uplink interference can be suppressed between 30 to 50 dB. (The simple mathematical example above illustrated infinite suppression because interference from user Bs signal was completely eliminated by the weights applied to derive user As signal, and vise versa.)
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In the downlink direction, practical issues often mean that the ability to null or mitigate transmitted interference is less than can be achieved in the uplink. As before, the performance in the downlink direction is dependent on the particular communication system. In a TDD system, practical issues limit the nulling performance to between 30 and 40 dB. It should be noted that within the fully adaptive approach of IntelliCell, the weighting and the receive and transmit interference suppression and mitigation are performed continuously and dynamically in very short time frames. This is a necessity: The radio environment is time varying on the scale of tens of milliseconds; and the network and service environment itself is time varying with in-cell and out-of-cell interferers appearing and disappearing with fluctuating power levels. The null placement is so precise that any slight variation in the signatures of the interferers can result in a 30 to 40dB null to be cut to a 10dB null, substantially reducing the network performance. 6.5 Higher Spectral Efficiency

The reduction in interference due to IntelliCell allows an increase either in the number of subscribers utilizing the spectrum or in the overall signal quality, which enables higher data throughput. The upshot of the reduction in interference network-wide is, in either case, an increase in spectral efficiency. The order-of-magnitude increases possible are in the range of 20-40X versus non-IntelliCell implementations. As shown before, spectral efficiency of existing systems is no mystery and can be calculated from their well-documented performance characteristics. These values typically yield spectral efficiencies of 0.1 bits/sec/Hz/cell. Fully adaptive implementations utilizing IntelliCell have been shown to achieve factors of 20X improvement in actual field performance. Furthermore, an approach such as ArrayComms iBURST, which designs and optimizes an air interface from the bottom up to utilize IntelliCell, can achieve spectral efficiency of 4 bits/sec/Hz/cell, or 40X conventional performance. While the details of these performance numbers are complicated, a simple calculation justifies this order-of-magnitude performance increase. Current, commercially available smart antenna systems based on TDD/TDMA air interfaces are able to achieve an intra-cell reuse of 3. In these SDMA (spatial division multiple access) systems, the same conventional resource (in this case, a timeslot of the same carrier) is used multiple times in the same sector or cell. Todays conventional TDMA systems such as GSM operate at a reuse of 7 i.e., the same timeslot and frequency combination is used in every 7th cell. The order-of-magnitude performance gain is, therefore, 3 divided by 1/7, or a factor of 21.

7. INTELLICELL ARCHITECTURE
IntelliCell systems employ a highly integrated approach in base station design, with the smart antenna architecture incorporated from the outset. Figure 6 shows the block diagram of such an architecture. IntelliCell systems make use of ordinary, off-the-shelf antennas. Received radio signals are digitized and accumulated by the receiver bank. This received data is then packaged and processed in the spatial temporal processing block. This block is the heart of the IntelliCell system and typically involves the use of high-performance digital signal processors and ASICs. This block extracts and demodulates the various signals of interest and appropriately packages the results for transport through the network interface and on into the network.

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At the same time, data is being received from the network bound for subscribers. The spatial temporal processing block communicates with the transmitter bank to indicate how the data is to be weighted across the different antennas. The operations in the transmitter bank consist of many, albeit simple, multiplication operations. Finally, the modulated data is routed through power amplifiers (PAs), one for each antenna, and transmitted across the array.
Figure 6 Typical IntelliCell Base Station Architecture

8. CONCLUSION
IntelliCell technology uses sophisticated signal processing techniques in combination with small arrays of standard, off-the-shelf antennas to manipulate signals at the base station and dynamically control transmission and reception. Conventional radio systems indiscriminately broadcast energy, creating interference for other users. Using IntelliCell processing, base stations optimize radio transmission and reception by selectively amplifying signals to / from users of interest and rejecting unwanted signals. This substantially increases the signal quality and suppresses and mitigates interference on both the uplink and downlink radio channels, resulting in increased coverage and spectral efficiency. The conventional techniques used to increase coverage and spectral efficiency have been exploited over the past 20 years to the point that gains from these techniques are incrementally small. Despite these efforts, the spectral efficiency of commercial air interfaces is typically only about 0.1-0.2 bits/sec/Hz/cell, independent of the technologies used. This performance is well short of what is needed to deliver broadband wireless data services
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economically. IntelliCell offers a solution with spectral efficiencies of up to 4 bits/sec/Hz, or 40 times those of conventional systems. Finally, though this white paper has focused on IntelliCell implementations at the base station, the technology is equally applicable to handsets and subscriber units. Todays trends in handset component costs and processing capabilities point to this being the next major frontier for IntelliCell and smart antenna technologies.
It may be argued that higher cell edge data rates may be easily obtained by allocating a large bandwidth to a particular subscriber at one time. However, this solution proportionally increases handset output power requirements on the uplink and per-user power levels on the downlink, proportionally increases handset battery power requirements, and degrades system capacity. 2 The somewhat confusing technical names for these two effects are respectively constructive interference of signals at the user and destructive interference of signals at other co-channel users.
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