Uplink TDMA Potential in WCDMA Systems

Abstract: The evolvement of the uplink in the third generation mobile telecommunication system is an ongoing process. The Enhanced Uplink (EUL) concept is being developed to meet the expected need from more advanced services, like video streaming and mobile broadband. One idea for further improvement in the EUL concept is to introduce Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), which is studied in this master thesis. The master thesis assignment is to study the consequences of introducing TDMA in EUL. The goal has been to identify the gains and problems, and how they can be handled. A derived theoretical framework and system simulations, using a radio network simulator, are used. The overall conclusion is that there is a potentially large gain with an introduction of TDMA in EUL. Simulations in favorable conditions have shown that the system throughput can increase by 100% when there are only User Equipment (UE) that are using EUL in the system and by 50% when there is a mix of speech and EUL UE’s. When using TDMA the uplink load also shows improvements, the mean is generally higher but the variance is generally smaller. Due to major differences in experienced interference between passive and active UE’s, the signal quality will vary a lot. The big variation in signal quality is identified as the main problem with introducing TDMA in EUL. It is shown that this problem can generate extreme high uplink load, which have a negative impact both on the resource efficiency and the coverage.