EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 1, Pages 32-45
doi:10.1155/S1687147204404034

CDMA Downlink Transmission with Transmit Antenna Arrays and Power Control in Multipath Fading Channels

Huaiyu Dai,1 Laurence Mailaender,2 and H. Vincent Poor3

1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7511, USA
2Wireless Communications Research Department, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ 07733, USA
3Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

Received 20 August 2003; Revised 11 March 2004

Copyright © 2004 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular downlink communications with transmit antenna arrays in multipath fading channels is studied. Various array signal processing techniques at the transmit end are investigated and compared under various settings, in conjunction with power control. No instant downlink channel information is assumed; however, the obtained results are also compared with results assuming ideal feedback. The study is carried out for both circuit-switched and packet-switched systems, where different goals are pursued and different conclusions are drawn. In particular, it is found that the traffic type impacts the algorithm choice in downlink transmission, and that there is no need to seek optimum power control/allocation schemes, which are either too complex or infeasible in practice. Another interesting conclusion is that, even though feedback does not help much for packet-switched systems, it does help for circuit-switched systems, the gain of which increases with the number of antennas.