Performance Evaluation Of Fixed-Beam Beamforming In Wcdma Downlink

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 degrees (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.