Dynamic system level simulations of downlink beamforming for UMTS FDD

A new dynamic system level simulator is developed for investigating the capacity improvement in a UMTS-FDD system employing smart antennas at the base stations. The simulator is used to analyze the performance of this system by finding the number of users for which a certain quality of service (QoS) requirement is fulfilled. In this paper, analyses of the downlink capacity for different numbers of array elements with different adaptive beamforming strategies are presented. When using smart antennas, the real amount of performance improvement can only be estimated by system level simulations. Hence, dynamic system level simulations for UMTS-FDD are carried out which take into account the statistical nature of almost all parameters, e.g. wave propagation, user motion and traffic scenarios. Simulation results show a significant system capacity increase when beamforming is utilized.