Performance evaluation of distributed-antenna communications systems using beam-hopping

Digital beamforming (DBF) techniques are capable of improving the performance of communications systems significantly. However, if the transmitted signals are conflicted with strong interference especially in the direction of the transmitted beams, these directional jamming signals will severely degrade the system performance. In order to efficiently mitigate the interference of the directional jammers, in this contribution a beam-hopping (BH) communications scheme is studied. In the BH communications scheme, only one pair of the beams is used for transmission and it hops from one to the next according to an assigned BH pattern. In this contribution, a range of expressions in terms of the average signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) performance have been derived, when both the uplink and downlink are considered. The average SINR performance of the BH scheme and that of the conventional single-beam (SB) as well as multiple-beam (MB) assisted beam-processing schemes have been investigated. Our analysis and results show that the BH scheme is capable of efficiently combating the directional jamming, with the aid of utilizing the directional gain of the beams generated by both the transmitter and the receiver. Furthermore, the BH scheme is capable of reducing the intercept probability of the communications. Therefore, the BH scheme is suitable for communications when several distributed antenna arrays are available around a mobile. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.