Diversity gain for CDMA systems equipped with antenna arrays

If the angular spread is not zero, the diversity gain can be achieved in the antenna-array reception. In order to achieve the diversity gain, we propose a beamforming method that utilizes two beamforming weight vectors and apply this beamforming technique to code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems equipped with antenna arrays under a time-varying multipath-fading channel environment. In the proposed beamforming method, the channel vector has been estimated using two basis vectors that span the signal subspace. Since the proposed beamforming method utilizes two-dimensional (2D) signal subspace, it provides better performance than the conventional beamforming method, which utilizes one-dimensional signal subspace. Through simulation results, we can see that the performance is improved as the angular spread gets larger.