Performance evaluation of fixed-beam beamforming in WCDMA downlink
Esa Tiirola, Juha Ylitalo · 2002
This paper studies downlink beamforming applied to the WCDMA system. The downlink performance of single-antenna transmission in a base station (BS) sector with 120/spl deg/ (reference case) is compared to the beamforming with a fixed-beam antenna array having two beams. The paper consists of link level simulations and the analysis of the simulation results. The performance is studied by using the so-called G-modelling principles, where G denotes geometry. Simulation results indicate that the fixed-beam approach could offer feasible coverage and capacity extension especially in macro cell environments. The downlink performance of a beamforming WCDMA BS deteriorates significantly in environments with large angular spread.