UMTS evolution to HSDPA

by Selepe Mathibela, Sentech The evolution of a global system for mobile telephony (GSM) towards enhanced data rates for GSM (EDGE) has proven to be a remarkably effective cellular-data technology and is now supported by operators worldwide.

The deployment of universal mobile telecoms system (UMTS), which has more powerful capabilities, is accelerating. The service providers who deployed UMTS networks to provide data services for MyWireless are enjoying the benets of these powerful data capabilities. Data services are expected to have signicant growth over the next few years and will likely become the dominant source of 3G trafc and revenue. In order to meet the increasing demand for high data-rate multimedia services, 3GPP has released a new high-speed data transfer feature named high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA). HSDPA provides impressive enhancements over UMTS R99 for the downlink. It offers peak rates of about 10 Mbps over 5 MHz bandwidth in the downlink. HSDPA offer three- to ve-fold sector throughput increase, which translates into signicantly more users on a single frequency. This will result in a better end-user experience for downlink data applications, with shorter connections and response times. Since HSDPA is fully backwards compatible with UMTS, any application developed for UMTS will work with HSDPA. On newer networks, it can be deployed as a software upgrade. The ability to offer higher peak rates for an increasingly performance-demanding end-user at a substantially lower cost will create a signicant competitive advantage for service providers. HSDPA technology HSDPA is a tremendous performance upgrade to UMTS for packet data that delivers peak datarates of about 10 Mbps and is likely to improve average throughput rates to about 1 Mbps which is about three times over UMTS. HSDPA is fully backward compatible with UMTS. HSDPA takes UMTS to its fullest potential for providing broadband services. HSDPA achieves its performance gains from the following key concepts: 48

High speed channels shared both in the code and time domains HSDPA uses high speed-downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH), with the necessary control channels, and up to 15 of these can operate in 5 MHz WCDMA radio channel. The high speedshared control channel (HS-SCCH) and high speed dedicated physical control channel have been added to support HS-DSCH operation. The HS-DSCH resources can be shared between all users in a particular sector. User transmissions are assigned to one or more of these channels for short transmission intervals of 2 ms. Within each 2 ms transmission time interval (TTI), a constant spreading factor of 16 is used for code multiplexing, with a maximum of 15 parallel codes allocated to HS-DSCH. The number of

to Node B) will be allocated higher data rates. The other benet of AMC is better utilisation of Node B power. Hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ) The H-ARQ scheme enables the user equipment (UE) to rapidly request retransmission to compensate for errors resulting from the link adaptation process. It also offers improved errorrate performance compared with conventional ARQ. The H-ARQ functionality is implemented at the MAC-has layer, which is terminated at the Node B, as opposed to radio link control (RLC), which is terminated at the serving radio network controller (RNC). This reduces the retransmission delay compared to that in R99. Fast scheduling controlled by media access control-high speed (MAC-hs) The scheduler is a key element of HSDPA that determines the overall behaviour of the system and, to a certain extent, its performance. Fast packet scheduling functions are performed by MAC-hs in the Node B as opposed to RNC in R99. these functions manage the HS-DSCH resources; select the coding/modulation scheme and Tx power for the HS-DSCH data packets. The UE that should be scheduled during a particular TTI is determined using channel quality indicator reports coming from the UE. Fast scheduling also allows guaranteed bit-rate services using packet scheduling without the need for a dedicated channel. The implementation of quality of service (QoS) (different subscription classes) creates new constraints on the scheduler. The fairness between the users may be dominated by the QoS requirements. Conclusion HSDPA is an evolution of UMTS that offers higher data rates than are needed to realise multimedia services for cellular mobile communications
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HSDPA is a tremendous performance upgrade to UMTS for packet data.

codes allocated to each user depends on the cell loading, QoS requirements and the UE code capabilities. Adaptive modulation and coding schemes (QPSK and 16 QAM) Adaptive modulation and coding is a fundamental feature for HSDPA. It consists of continuously optimising the code rate, the modulation scheme, the number of codes employed and transmit power per code based on the channel quality reported by the user equipment. HSDPA adds higher order modulation (16 QAM) to the existing QPSK used on WCDMA R99. 16QAM modulation and fast link adaptation can be combined to optimise the instantaneous use of the varying radio channel. 16QAM makes better use of available bandwidth but demands more receive power per bit. Users with more favourable channel conditions (those closer

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systems. It does that by introducing a downlink channel that supports symmetric packet-data services. The rollout of HSDPA will give service providers a competitive edge over its competitors and provide a wider range of applications to user and possibly increase revenue and market share. For the users and operators, it introduces: Better network performance under loaded conditions Faster application performance Greater range of applications such as Interactive gaming Improves the use of streaming applications Lower roundtrip delays will benet web browsing applications Fully supports data intensive applications due to its improved capacity HSDPA is fully backwards compatible with UMTS Deployed as software upgrade which means lower costs to deploy.

Contact Selepe Mathibela, Sentech, Tel (011) 471-4436, selepep@sentech.co.za

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Elektron September 2005