Closed-Loop Transmit Diversity Techniques for Small Wireless Terminals and Their Performance Assessment in a Flat Fading Channel

Closed-loop transmit diversity is considered an important technique for improving the link budget in the third generation and future wireless communication standards. This paper proposes several transmit diversity algorithms suitable for small wireless terminals and presents performance assessment in terms of average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and outage improvement, convergence, and complexity of operations. The algorithms presented herein are verified using data from measured indoor channels with variable antenna spacing and the results explained using measured radiation patterns for a two-element array. It is shown that for a two-element array, the best among the proposed techniques provides SNR improvement of about 3 dB in a tightly spaced array (inter-element spacing of 0.1 wavelength at 2 GHz) typical of small wireless devices. Additionally, these techniques are shown to perform significantly better than a single antenna device in an indoor channel considering realistic values of latency and propagation errors.