Performance evaluation of CDMA reverse links with imperfect beamforming in a multicell environment using a simplified beamforming model

Reverse link capacity of a direct-sequence codedivision multiple-access (DS-CDMA) system in a multicell environment has been studied recently, and significant capacity improvements due to the use of beamforming have been observed. However, system performance with beamforming will be affected by several impairments, such as direction of arrival estimation errors, array perturbations, mutual coupling, and signal spatial spreads. In this paper, reverse link performance of CDMA systems with beamforming under these impairments (imperfect beamforming) is investigated. A simplified beamforming model is developed to evaluate the system performance in terms of user capacity, bit-error rates (BER), and outage probabilities. Both signal-to-interference-ratio-based power control and strengthbased power control are considered in this paper. The capacity and BER degradations due to different impairments are shown, and outage probabilities under different power control schemes are examined