Hybrid beamforming scheme for CDMA systems to overcome the insufficient pilot power problem in correlated SIMO channels

A hybrid beamformer composed of a direction-of-arrival (DOA) based scheme and maximal ratio combining (MRC) is proposed to overcome the degradation caused by inaccurate channel estimation due to insufficient pilot power, which happens in conventional single-input, multiple-output (SIMO) Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) reverse link. The proposed scheme can provide more accurate channel estimation and interference reduction at the expense of diversity gain in the spatially correlated SIMO channel. As a result, the hybrid scheme outperforms conventional MRC beamformers for six or more antennas in the channel environment, in which the angle-of-spread (AOS) is within 30°.