Orthogonal switched beams for downlink diversity transmission

A downlink transmission scheme in a switched-beam antenna system for providing diversity and beamforming simultaneously based on the space-time block coding technique is proposed. The scheme involves selecting multiple beams based on the uplink reception of the switched-beam antenna system, and determining multiple orthogonal beams from the selected beams. With the orthogonal transmit beams, the proposed switched-beam antenna system outperforms conventional switched-beam systems and approaches the optimal performance achievable by a much complex adaptive antenna system.