Research on the Potential Benefit of Beamforming in HSUPA

In this paper, we investigate the potential benefit of transmit beamforming (BF) in HSPA uplink. We explore the possibility of improving the uplink performance (in terms of data throughput and user outage ratio) of WCDMA HSPA using BF antenna array receiver. The key difference between our study and many existing smart-antenna results is that we consider the dynamics associated with power-control and upper-layer algorithms. We show that HSUPA with 4-antenna BF receiver achieves more than 3 dB gain over traditional 2-antenna receiver in sector throughput and more than 6 dB decrease in UE transmit power.