Forward Link Data Service with Beamforming and Soft Handoff in Cellular CDMA

The present paper proposes a scheme of combining soft handoff (HO) and beamforming in physical layer and automatic repeat request (ARQ) in link layer for improving the performance of data service in forward link of cellular CDMA. A stop and wait ARQ scheme has been assumed for forward link data service. Joint effects of beamforming and soft handoff via cross layer interaction reduce delay, bit error rate (BER) and increase throughput significantly. Impacts of several parameters of soft handoff and beamforming and their cross layer interaction on data performance have been evaluated. Both the cases of perfect and imperfect beamforming have been investigated. Effects of DoA (direction of arrival) estimation error associated with beamforming have also been indicated on data service.