Beamforming vs. 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. We present a comparative analysis of the two systems, using outage capacity as the performance measure. The effects of handoff and correlated fading are considered.