Achieving Directionality and Transmit Diversity via Integrating Beam Pattern Scanning (BPS) Antenna Arrays and OFDM

In this paper, we introduce a novel merger of antenna arrays with scanning beam patterns, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Controlled time varying phase shifts are applied to the antenna array elements mounted at the base station with beam patterns directed toward the desired user. This creates a small beam pattern movement called Beam Pattern Scanning (BPS). In rich scattering environments BPS creates a time varying environment leading to time diversity exploitable at the receiver enhances its probability-of-error performance. Here, we apply OFDM signals to BPS antenna arrays, and we achieve: (1) directionality, which supports Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA); and (2) a time diversity gain, which leads to high performance. We discuss the structure of the base station antenna array and the OFDM receiver that exploits time diversity. We also introduce the merger of BPS and multi-carrier OFDM (MC-OFDM) systems. In MC-OFDM each bit is transmitted over all sub-carriers after serial to parallel conversion. BPS/ MC-OFDM receiver exploits both time diversity inherent in BPS, and frequency diversity inherent in MC-OFDM transmission technique. Simulation results show high Probability-of-error performance is achievable via BPS/OFDM and BPS/MC-OFDM schemes comparing to the traditional OFDM and MC-OFDM, respectively. Simulations also reveal that MC-OFDM system as well as its merger with BPS is capable of mitigating large Peak-to-Average Ratio (PAPR) problem in traditional OFDM system. In addition, performance simulations with coded OFDM (COFDM) and coded MC-OFDM (MC-COFDM) and their merger with BPS are studied.