WCDMA enhanced uplink - test bed and measurements

The WCDMA specification is constantly evolving. In this paper we present results from measurements on a test bed, based on the WCDMA enhanced uplink (UL) concept, which is being introduced in the 6th release of the WCDMA specification. The enhanced UL test bed has been implemented on top of a commercial WCDMA release 99 cellular system and integrated with an existing high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) test bed. Measurements have been performed over a coaxial network that includes a fading channel emulator. Three transport formats have been measured: 336, 672 and 1344 kbit/s. The measured performance is very close to simulated performance at moderate block error rates (BLER). For high signal-to-noise ratios an error floor causes some degradation.