Capacity of future WCDMA networks supporting multimedia services

This paper presents an analytical model suitable to evaluate wideband code-division multiple-access (WCDMA) system capacity in terms of supported multimedia services achieving the required percentage of satisfied users. The satisfied-user criteria proposed by the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System introduce session-level performance measures, providing a more comprehensive notion of users' quality-of-service (QoS), but requiring knowledge of both outage probability and outage correlation behavior. By using a two-state (good-bad) Gilbert channel to represent the outage behavior, the model parameters and satisfied-user probability for both speech and data sessions are derived for different uplink and downlink scenarios. The proposed analytical model can be used for WCDMA system dimensioning to assess the throughput and session interruption probabilities of data services and their impact on the satisfied-user probability of speech services.