Statistical Properties of Fading Processes in WCDMA Systems

When simulating radio access networks (RANs) on the network level, the representation of the physical layer is on the MAC-layer can have a significant impact on the system performance. This paper focuses on the distribution of frame errors in WCDMA systems. We first study the statistical properties of the frame-error distribution as obtained by physical layer simulation. We then compare the statistical properties to those obtained from statistical channel models for both cases with activated and deactivated closed-loop power control. Finally, an envelope based approach to decide on the successful transmission or the loss of a MAC frame is presented and the applicability of this new approach is verified