Performance of 3GPP high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA)

High speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) technology was standardized for 3GPP W-CDMA release-5. HSDPA includes advanced techniques such as adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), hybrid ARQ (HARQ), and fast scheduling. HSDPA can deliver a 3× increase in sector and a 6× increase in user throughput for some traffic models. Additionally HSDPA can support almost a 4× increase in the number of users compared to UMTS release-99 for the same service. With advanced receivers, HSDPA can support broadband quality service with 60 users per site. This paper provides an overview of the physical layer aspects of HSDPA and discusses the improvements in sector and user throughput (with respect to release-99 UMTS) resulting from HSDPA with joint scheduling and resource allocation.