BEYOND

3G

HSDPA
Rajeev Bansal
&
Vikas Nigam

HSDPA an evolution of 3rd generation mobile communication is delivering increased data rates,
lower latency and higher capacity. High Speed Downlink Packet Access is expected to drive
data usage within business and consumer markets and it will enable seamless access to mobile
broadband services. High-end services like Streaming applications, video call, video and MP3
downloads will take a matter of seconds compared to existing technologies. In comparison to
UMTS available today, HSDPA offers: Access to broader content due to the high speed downlink
transmission. End-users will experience ADSL like download speeds, without the cable.
Authors
Shri Rajeev Bansal, working as DGM
(GSM & 3G) at ALTTC, Ghaziabad is
an officer of ITS Group 'A' of 1991
batch. He has worked in MTNL
Mumbai and Gujarat Circle prior to
posting in ALTTC, Ghaziabad. He has
worked as validation team member of
BSS of Nokia equipment supplied as
part of Phase IV of CMTS equipment
in North Zone. He has also visited
Ericsson Training centre at Stockholm,
Sweden for undergoing training on 'Mobile Intelligent
Network'. Presently he is responsible for design, development
and conduction of various Courses/Workshop/Seminar on
GSM, GPRS/EDGE, 3G and AXE -10 Technology
Shri Vikas Nigam, is presently
working as SDE (GSM) at ALTTC,
Ghaziabad. He is an Associate
Member of Institution of Engineers
(India). He is specialized in switching
stream and prior to posting in ALTTC,
Ghaziabad he has worked in
Rajasthan Telecom Circle. At ALTTC
he
is
responsible
for
design,
development and conduction of
various Courses/ Workshop/ Seminar
on GSM, GPRS/ EDGE, International Roaming and 3rd
Generation Mobile Communication. Presently he is involved in
installation work of new 3G Ericsson Lab at ALTTC
Ghaziabad.

hen there was a tough competition

among various wireless technologies
for optimum as well as efficient use of
radio resources and at the same time the high
need to provide high data rate in the range of 2-5
Mbps, W-CDMA appears to have hit a speed
bump.
W-CDMA technology, provides the radio
interface in the 3G mobile system defined by the
3GPP, theoretically it can deliver peak data rates
up to 2 Mbps. But in actual networks, the average
data throughput rate reportedly doesn't go much
beyond 384 kbps.
HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet
Access) was Incorporated in Release 5 of the
3GPP W-CDMA specifications technology as an
effort to make the system more efficient for
bandwidth-intensive data applications and it was
proved to be one of the most significant change
on the RF side.
HSDPA is a mobile radio interface
technology, which allows networks based on
UMTS to have higher data transfer speeds and
capacity.
HSDPA is evolved from Release 99 WCDMA

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Short TTI helps in many ways:

systems, it fires a similar shot for WCDMA that

EDGE does for GSM. It provides a two-fold
increase in air interface capacity and a five-fold
increase in data speeds in the downlink direction.
Mobile operators committed to W-CDMA are
trying hard for quick deployment of the HSDPA
network to keep themselves competitively ahead
with 1EV-DO- based rivals.
HSDPA deployments can support down-link
speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.4 Mbps. Further
speed increases are available with HSPA+, which
provides speeds of up to 42 Mbps downlink.
2.0 New Steps in HSDPA

o improve W-CDMA system performance,

HSDPA makes a number of changes to the
radio interface that mainly affect the physical and
transport layers:
2.1 Shorter Radio Frame
Instead of 10ms frame length, Shorter
Transmission Time Interval (TTI) of 2ms is used
in HSDPA. A Radio frame in HSDPA, actually a
sub-frame in WCDMA, is 2ms in length and
equivalent to three of currently defined WCDMA
slots. Therefore there are five HSDPA sub-frame
in 10ms WCDMA frame.

It reduces round trip delay.

It helps in fast link adaptation
It helps in fast Scheduling and fast hybrid
ARQ
2.2 New High-speed Downlink Channels
In traditional cellular systems, resources are
typically allocated in a relatively static way, where
the data rate for a user is changed slowly or not
at all. This is efficient for services with a relatively
constant data rate such as voice. However for
high speed data access data typically arrives in
bursts, it poses rapidly varying requirements on
the amount of radio resources required.
Therefore for low delays required for good enduser experience, a fast allocation of shared
resources is required.
HSDPA solves this situation by introducing a
shared channel, called the High Speed Downlink
shared Channel (HS-DSCH). The HS-DSCH as
the name indicates, shared among all users that
are using HSPDA for their interactive/ background
radio access bearer. This shared transport
channel can be mapped onto one or several
physical channels (also known as codes) using

10ms WCDMA Frame

OTN FRAME
FIGURE 1

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CHANNELIZATION CODES ALLOCATED FOR HS-DS CH TRANSMISSION

FIGURE 2
spreading factor 16. Users can take turns on a 2
ms time basis, but typically one user gets many
consecutive TTIs.
2.3 Use of 16 QAM in Addition to QPSK
Modulation
HSDPA generally uses QPSK modulation
and when radio conditions are good 16-QAM is
used. Like all modulation schemes, 16-QAM
conveys
data
by
changing
some
aspect of a carrier
signal, or the carrier
wave,
(usually
a
sinusoid) in response
to a data signal. In
the case of 16-QAM,
the amplitude of two
waves, 90 degrees out-of-phase with each other
(in quadrature) are changed (modulated or
keyed) to represent the data signal.
2.4 Fast link adaptation using AMC
Link adaptation is one important way in

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which HSDPA improves data throughput. In

HSDPA, Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC)
technique is used. The modulation scheme and
coding is changed on a per-user basis depending
on signal quality and cell usage. The initial
modulation scheme is QPSK, but in good radio
conditions, use of 16-QAM modulation almost
doubles data throughput rates. With 5 Code
allocation, QPSK typically offers up to 1.8 Mbps
peak data rates, while 16 QAM up to 3.6 Mbps.
Additional codes (e.g. 10, 15) can also be used to
improve these data rates or extend the network
capacity throughput significantly. Theoretically,
HSDPA can give throughput up to 14.4 Mbps.
In adaptive coding the spreading factor
remains fixed, but the coding rate can vary
between 1/4 and 3/4. Link adaptation ensures the
highest possible data rate is achieved both for
users with good signal quality (higher coding
rate), typically close to the base station, and for
more distant users at the cell edge (lower coding
rate), data rates adapted to radio conditions on
2ms time basis.

2.5 Use of Hybrid ARQ

channel quality,

In a conventional ARQ scheme, received

data blocks that cannot be decoded are
discarded and retransmitted data blocks are
separately decoded.

terminal capability,

Hybrid ARQ uses incremental redundancy,

where user data is transmitted multiple times
using different codings. In HARQ received data
blocks that cannot be decoded are not discarded.
Instead the corresponding received signal is
buffered and soft combined with later received
retransmissions of the same set of information
bits. Decoding is then applied to the combined
signal.
2.6 Fast Scheduling Function in Node-B
Scheduling of the transmission of data
packets over the air interface is performed in the
base station based on information about the:

QoS class and

power/code availability.
Scheduling is fast because it is performed
as close to the air interface as possible and
because a short frame length (TTI) is used.
3.0 Conclusion

SDPA is an enhanced 3G mobile telephony

communication protocol in the HSPA family.
Current HSDPA deployments support down-link
speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2 and 14.0 Mbps. Further
speed increases are available with HSPA+, which
provides speeds of up to 42 Mbps down link.
HSDPA is a part of VMTS standards since
release 5, which also accompanies an
improvement on the uplink providing a new
bearer of 384 Kbps.

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