Geometry and Wideband Performance of a Maximal Ratio Combining Beam

This paper discusses the geometrical features and wideband performance of the beam with maximal ratio combining coefficients for a generic multi-antenna receiver. In particular, in case the channel is a linear combination of plane waves, we show that such a beam can be decomposed in a linear combination of beams pointed in the direction of each plane wave, and we compute how many directions can be effectively utilized. This highlights that such a beam is better exploiting the spatial diversity provided by the channel, and therefore it is expected to be more robust to disruptions. Moreover, we compute the achieved Signal-to-Noise-Ratio for a wideband receiver, showing that it is wthin 2dB of the one of other methods. Finally, we provide some insights on the robustness of the method by simulating the impact of the blockage of one multipath components.