Estimation of the scattering radius around a mobile handset using a sub-space technique

There have been a number of attempts to use experimental data to obtain estimates of the scattering radius of scatterers around transmitters in cellular radio systems. This paper presents a new method of estimating the scattering radius using a linear array antenna at the receiver. The method is based on a sub-space technique for estimating the angle of arrival of the received signals. The new method exploits the decorrelation of the received signal across the multiple antenna elements of a linear array antenna to estimate the angular spread. In the paper, the concept of the new mettled is developed and its performance is verified for an eight element antenna array using a Monte-Carlo simulation of a DCS1800 system for two different scattering models. One is a uniform disk of scatterers and the other is a random distribution of scatterers.