Performance evaluation of DOA based beamforming in W-CDMA system

In wireless communications, a smart antenna system utilizes an antenna array to acquire the spatial signatures of the transmitted signals and uses the difference of the spatial signatures or the direction of arrival (DOA) of signals to correctly obtain the desired signal. This can reduce co-channel interference, mitigate the fading phenomenon caused by the multipath transmission, increase the system capacity and improve the communication quality. The purpose of this paper is to study the performance of the smart antenna DOA based beamforming algorithm applied to a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. The simulation results show that a W-CDMA system with smart antenna, compared with that with an omnidirectional antenna, can have a lower bit error rate at the specific signal to noise ratio (SNR), allow more users to access the system at the specific bit error rate and increase the system capacity.