The impact of AOA energy distribution on the spatial fading correlation of linear antenna array

In this paper, we present the comparative spatial fading correlation function of a uniform linear array (ULA) for various angle-of-arrival (AOA) distributions in a mobile radio environment. The spatial fading correlation for ULA is a function of the angle spread and distance between elements. Angle spread is a measure of the energy distribution in AOA and is defined to be the variance in this work. Three AOA distributions are considered in this work: uniform, truncated Gaussian, and Laplacian. Results show that the three AOA distributions give similar spatial fading correlation for the same angle spread suggesting that the variance of the distribution is more important than the actual distribution. Computer simulations are carried out to verify the analytical results.