Enhancing the performance of HSDPA communication with multipoint transmission techniques

Abstract

The evolution of mobile phones, tablets and other mobile communication devices has led to a significant increase in the amount of data delivered over mobile networks. In order to satisfy the climbing data rate demands of customers, existing mobile broadband networks are being expanded with new features that allow ubiquitous and consistent networking experience. This research presents three multipoint transmission techniques for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) based High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) communication protocol. Multiflow, High-Speed Single-Frequency Network (HS-SFN) and Multipoint-to-Point Single-Frequency Network (M2P-SFN) enable transmission of user-dedicated data from several cells, with the objective to improve performance, especially in cell edges where the signal quality is usually weak. The main difference between the concepts is the way cell-specific scrambling codes are configured in the network, which eventually determines how flow control, physical layer resource allocation and signal formation and reception will be conducted. The performance of each technique is separately evaluated with systemlevel simulations. In addition, the dissertation discusses issues with regard to interference conditions and mobility control that may originate from multipoint transmissions.