Beamforming versus transmit diversity in the downlink of a cellular communications system

Transmit diversity and beamforming are two complementary techniques for using multiple antennas in the forward link of a cellular communication system. The first provides the benefit of diversity with no array gain, while the second provides array gain, but no diversity. Here, we present a comparative analysis of the two systems, using outage capacity and transmit power as performance measures. The effects of handoff, correlated fading, and power control are considered.