Coexistence of Real Time and Best Effort Services in Enhanced Uplink WCDMA

Abstract: The increasing use of data services and the importance of IP basedservices in third generation mobile communication system (3G), requires the transmission from the cell phone to the base station, i.e. uplink, to manage high speed data rates. In the air interface for 3G in Europe, WCDMA, a concept for enhancing the transmission from the cell phone to the base station, called Enhanced Uplink, is being standardized. The overall goal is to provide high speed data access for the uplink. One of the requirements is that the enhanced uplink channels must be able to coexist with already existing WCDMA releases. For example, the enhanced uplink must not impact seriously on real time services, such as speech, carried on current WCDMA channels. The purpose of this work is to study how the quality, coverage and capacity of real time services carried on previous WCDMA releases is affected when introducing the Enhanced Uplink in a WCDMA network. The main focus of the study is thus to demonstrate the trade-off between voice and best effort performances. Theoretical assessments and simulations show that the Enhanced Uplink has many advantages over previous WCDMA releases. For example the Enhanced Uplink yields a larger system throughput for all voice loads. The noise rise, i.e. the ratio of total received power to the background noise power is being considered as the resource. It is shown that user traffic carried on the Enhanced Uplink is able to operate under a higher noise rise level as well as to get a higher throughput per noise rise. The resource is hence more efficiently utilized.