Nouvelles m?thodes de traitement d?antenne en ?mission alliant diversit? et formation de voie

This work deals with the use of an antenna array at the base station of a mobile communication system for transmission. In reception, solutions that exploit the antenna array are now well established. In transmission, however, the problem remains open. Two approaches are possible : exploit the array by using beamforming techniques or by using diversity techniques. These two approaches are based on opposite assumptions about the channels correlation, which implies a greater or smaller distance between antennas, depending on the environment. In practice, these assumptions are not verified. Here, we aim to deal with the problem as a whole for better exploiting the antenna array. This work treats the mono-user case, as well as the multi-user scenario. In the mono-user case, we propose a transmission scheme composed of a classical transmit diversity technique applied to virtual antennas, which are directive and ideally independent. These virtual antennas are produced by means of purely spatial filters applied to the real antennas. This set of filters is called precoder, and acts as the interface between the transmit diversity technique and the transmit antenna array. The precoder function is twofold ; to beamform the transmit signal, and to create diversity by means of ideally independent virtual antennas, thus combining transmit diversity and transmit beamforming. We propose two approaches to obtain this precoder, one based on the minimization of the variance of the received power at the mobile, and the other directly based on the minimization of the error rate. Compared to more classical approaches, the performance of the new methods reveals their advantage. Then, we extend this scheme to a multi-user context, for which transmit diversity techniques have not yet been developed. We propose to jointly adapt the precoders by minimizing the total transmit power while satisfying the users? target BER. Similarly to the mono-user case, the precoders allow to combine beamforming and transmit diversity. Compared to classical multi-user beamforming techniques, the new approach adds diversity to the link and obtains in return better performances.