Performance comparison of transmit diversity and beamforming for the downlink of DS-CDMA system

A theoretical analysis has been made to compare the capacity performances of transmit diversity and beamforming in the downlink of direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system. The performances of selection transmit diversity (STD), beamforming (BF), and beam selection transmit diversity (BSTD), which is a hybrid scheme of STD and BF, have been studied at system level with capacity as the performance index. Both fading and interference are jointly considered in multipath propagation environment. It was found that the comparison result strongly relates to the availability of path diversity. The system capacity is maximized by the BF in the presence of path diversity, otherwise it is the BSTD that achieves the best overall capacity performance.