On Transmission of Streaming Services over HSDPA

High speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) was originally introduced in release 5 of WCDMA to boost data rates of packet switched traffic in the downlink. With increasing demand for streaming services and recent efforts to provide mobile TV, the standard has also been considered for delivering streaming services over cellular networks. While much attention has been paid to optimizing transmission of non real time application, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive study of particular requirements and performance aspects of transmission of streaming services over HSDPA. We compare performances of different scheduling algorithms in pure streaming scenarios for constant bit rate as well as variable bit rate streams and different streaming rates. We further study the impact of code multiplexing of different streaming users on the system performance and examine the system behavior when both streaming and best effort services are present.