A compact beam splitter consisting of three branches of periodic dielectric waveguides (PDW) is designed and analyzed theoretically. Both the symmetrical and asymmetrical configurations of the beam splitter are studied. The band structure for the guided modes is calculated by using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method with Bloch-type boundary conditions applying in an appropriate supercell. The field patterns for the whole structure and the transmissions for the output ports are calculated using the multiple scattering method. By utilizing the co-directional coupling mechanism, the light injected into the input branch can be efficiently transferred into the two output branches if the phase matching conditions are satisfied. The coupling length is short and the broad-band requirement can be achieved. Bending loss is small and high transmission (above 95%) can be preserved for arbitrarily bent PDW if the bend radius of each bend exceeds five wavelengths. This feature indicates that the periodic dielectric waveguide beam splitter (PDWBS) is a high efficiency device for power redistribution while avoiding the lattice orientation restriction of the photonic crystal waveguides (PCW).