ACTS FRAMES project towards IMT-2000/UMTS

Market expectations show an increasing demand for a wide range of services from voice, low up to high and advanced data rate services as mobile multimedia. This leads to technical requirements on third generation mobile radio systems (IMT-2000 in ITU and UMTS in ETSI in Europe), which are currently standardized worldwide. Circuit and packet oriented services will be supported. These systems will be operated in all radio environments to provide service to anyone, anytime and anywhere. In Europe the European Commission is partly funding research activities in the ACTS framework related to third generation systems. The ACTS FRAMES project has developed a spectrum efficient radio interface proposal for UMTS/IMT-2000. This paper briefly describes the original technical approach of the FRAMES project and the international standardization activities. Based on the decision of ETSI SMG on the UTRA (UMTS terrestrial radio access) radio concept FRAMES is investigating the UTRA radio interface for further improvement. The evaluation for the European contribution to the ITU for IMT-2000 was supported by FRAMES. The paper focuses on the UTRA concept and its performance.