Most time-reference beamforming algorithms suffer from severe beampattern distortion effects when applied to high bit rate services in WCDMA, causing serious performance degradation in terms of output BER, especially at high input SINR levels. These shortcomings are essentially caused by the uplink multiplexing of the traffic channel, which is seen by the base station as a powerful interfering source coming from the direction of arrival of the desired user. In this paper, a semi-blind beamforming technique is proposed as a valid solution to overcome this effect. The suggested scheme resorts to a conditional maximum likelihood approach to the underlying estimation problem and is designed to operate in an iterative fashion.

Peer Reviewed