In this paper, a novel beam selection transmit diversity (BSTD) scheme is proposed for the downlink transmission of frequency division duplex (FDD) based DS-CDMA system. As a combination of selection transmit diversity and steering vector based beamforming, the BSTD scheme provides diversity gain as well as reducing multiple access interference in downlink. Moreover, to have a better understanding, the performance of the BSTD is also compared with other schemes. The comparison results show that the BSTD would be a promising candidate for the downlink transmission if both performance and implementation complexity are considered.

For base station antenna array systems with time-division-duplex (TDD) mode, downlink channel responses are equal to uplink channel responses if the duplexing time is small, thus it is often believed that TDD mode simplies downlink beamforming problem as uplink weights can be applied for downlink directly. In this letter, we show that for TDD DS-CDMA systems, even though uplink and downlink channel responses are equal, optimal uplink weights are no longer equal to the optimal downlink ones due to asynchronous property in uplink and synchronous property in downlink, as well as different data rate traffic and QoS requirements. Computer simulations show that for asymmetric traffic, if uplink weights are used for downlink directly, downlink system capacity is less than 50% of that with optimal downlink weights.