Effect of angle of arrival on transmit diversity and beamforming systems under correlated fading

Transmit diversity and beamforming are two well known complementary techniques for using multiple antennas in the forward link of a cellular communication system. We present a comparative analysis, using outage capacity as performance measure. The effects of correlated fading and the distribution of angles of arrival are considered. The paper examines the effect of angle of arrival (AOA) distributions on two systems with angle spread. We do so by comparing the performance of transmit diversity with a system that uses beamforming to point a relatively narrow beam at the mobile station. Results show that the transmit diversity system using uniform linear arrays with truncated Laplacian AOA, always perform better, even at smaller angle spreads as compared to other energy distributions