Realistic Performance of HSDPA Evolution 64-QAM in Macro-Cell Environment

Ahmed Saadani
Orange Labs Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France
Abstract The HSDPA system evolution introduces new Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCSs) that use 64 QAM modulation in order to increase the maximum achievable throughput. We propose in this work to evaluate with a realistic approach the new mobile categories performance in macro-cell environments. This approach is based on link level simulations and drive test measurements. By considering a classic network configuration and using the LMMSE equalizer with receiver diversity, we show that there is no throughput gain compared to Release 5 MCSs using 16-QAM modulation. However, interesting throughput enhancements are obtained when the base station increases its transmitted power to 40 Watt. Keywords: HS-DSCH, 64-QAM, LMMSE equalizer, Rx diversity, drive test measurements

Jean-Baptiste Landre
Orange Labs Issy-Les-Moulineaux, France mobiles category 14. It is important to keep in mind that these throughputs associated to each HSDPA mobile category are the peak ones. Indeed, such throughputs can only be achieved under optimal network conditions: very close to the base station, during off-hours, in good fading conditions To increase the bit rate, the MCSs having a high number of spreading codes are selected. However, passing through a frequency selective channel the orthogonality between spreading codes is lost and intra-cell multiple access interference (MAI) arises. For high order modulation, this interference can strongly reduce the performance. In this case, the Rake receiver gives very poor performance and advanced receivers are needed. Currently, progress in signal processing technology has led to the emergence of advanced receivers: Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) equalizer [2], receiver diversity [3], parallel and serial interference canceller. The use of the chip level LMMSE in downlink can restore the orthogonality between the used spreading codes in the cell without knowing them. Several previous works evaluated the HSDPA release 5 performance at the link level and extended them to the system level [3][4][5] based on ideal network models (hexagonal cells,). The high order modulation performance impact has been recently studied by the same approach in [6][7]. However the real topography of a network and the sites parameters from an actual network has never been considered. Recently, we showed in [8] a realistic HSDPA release 5 performance respecting these aspects. Results were exclusively obtained by simulations at link level and drive test measurements which give a very accurate assessment method to go up to real network performance. We propose in this paper to extend our work in [8] to the new release 7 mobile categories and to provide an assessment of the throughputs that can be achieved under more realistic network conditions. In fact, drive test measurements are used to get the signal to noise ratio estimate. Evaluation is carried out for several locations in the cells, and considers the actual network load. Network topology and real propagation conditions are taken into account. The LMMSE equalizer with double receiver antennas is simulated. Link level simulations with fast link adaptation are firstly performed. They are then combined with drive test measurements to get an estimate of the HSDPA throughputs that can be achieved on a real network.

I.

INTRODUCTION

The HSDPA system is an evolution in downlink of the WCDMA networks and specified in 3GPP release 5. It offers packet switch services with high throughputs for users in good radio conditions. Indeed, a new transport channel, the High Speed Downlink Shared Channel (HS-DSCH), is defined. It can be mapped on several physical channels thanks to the use of up to 15 spreading codes with factor 16. The 16-QAM modulation can be used instead of QPSK in order to increase the transmitted data rate. Moreover, retransmissions are possible thanks to Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) mechanisms. To make the link adaptation and the scheduling efficient, the HSDPA system has its Time Transmit Interval (TTI) shortened to 2 ms. Indeed, several Adaptive Modulation Coding Schemes (MCS) are defined and their selection depending on the radio link condition is done every TTI. This high system reactivity is combined to fast scheduling techniques to obtain the multiuser diversity gain. Several capabilities of HSDPA mobiles were proposed in the release 5. The peak throughput varies from 1.8 Mbps for mobiles category 12 to 14.4 Mbps for mobiles category 10. New mobile categories were recently introduced in release 7 [1] in order to achieve higher throughputs. In fact, high order modulation (64-QAM) is introduced and MIMO transmission is possible. The first available mobile categories should be the ones that consider only high order modulation since the use of MIMO implies complex receivers based on interference cancellation techniques. The peak rate is 19.2 Mbps when only 64-QAM modulation is considered and it can be achieved by

978-1-4244-2517-4/09/$20.00 2009 IEEE

This paper is organized as follows. Section II presents the link level modeling and simulation outputs. We discuss in section III the advantages and drawbacks of existing approaches to get realistic results. Section IV explains the methodology to estimated network performance. The obtained results are shown and discussed in section V. II. LINK LEVEL MODELLING AND OUTPUTS

where K.Ec corresponds to HS-DSCH transmitting power. The channel is assumed to be perfectly known at the receiver. The HARQ Chase Combining is also active with maximum four retransmissions. Fast link adaptation is considered to provide average throughputs. Indeed, the average is performed on the different multi-path channel realizations using an MCS selection every TTI on the actual channel realization. The best MCS should ensure a block error rate lower that 10%. Of course, this choice depends on the considered receiver type. We show in table I the MCSs for release 5 UE (User Equipment i.e. mobile) category 10 and release 7 UE category 14. For Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) lower than 26 the MCSs are the same for both categories. One can note that mobile category 13 has the same MCSs as 14 except for the last CQI which is suppressed.
TABLE I. CQI V.S. MCS TABLE OF UE CATEGORY 10/14

A. System model Let's consider a stream of chips denoted by dm transmitted by the NodeB at the instant mTc where Tc is the chip duration. One can write the received signal on one antenna in the vector form as

y m = Hd m + n m
where

(1)

y m = [ ym q ,..., ym ,..., ym + q ]t is the received

signal on a time window centered on the instant m Tc which t is the size is (2q+1) Tc, d m = d m q L +1 ,..., d m ,..., d m +q transmitted vector through the channel represented by the (2q+1) x (2q+L) matrix

CQI 26 27 28 29 30

Modulation 16/64 QAM 16/64 QAM 16/64 QAM 16/64 QAM 16/64 QAM

codes 12/10 15/12 15/13 15/14 15

hL 1 0 H= 0

h0 hL 1 0

0 h0 hL 1

0 0 h0

Transport Block size 17237/15761 21754/21754 23370/26490 24222/32257 25558/38582

(2)

L corresponds to the maximum delay spread, hl (0 l L-1) are the channel taps and n m = [nm q ,..., nm ,..., nm +q ]t is the white Gaussian noise vector with power spectral density N0 per component. The channel coefficients hl are i.i.d. complex Gaussian random variables and assumed to be constant on the TTI.

By denoting f = [ f 0 ,..., f 2 q ]t the linear receiving filter, the well known LMMSE receiver solution is f LMMSE = (HH H + N0 I ) 1 H q + L , KE c (3)

Link level simulations results are shown in figure 1 for a Pedestrian-A channel with LMMSE receiver with/without receiver diversity. At high SNR one can note that all mobile categories achieve their maximum throughputs. Moreover, the receiver diversity produces an important gain. Of course, UE 13-14 peak throughput is higher than the UE 10 one. For SNR raging between 18 dB to 25 dB the UE 10 throughput outperforms the others. Indeed, the fast link adaptation granularity is not the same for both cases: in release 5, at FER=0.1 the SNRs of successive MCSs are separated by 1 dB. However for UE 13-14, since they are assumed to work in very good radio conditions, two successive MCSs starting from CQI 26 are separated by 1.5 or 2 dB which makes the link adaptation less efficient.
Ped-A, 3km/h, HARQ CC4, Fast link adaptation, LMMSE 20 18 16 14 Throughput (Mbps) 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 -20 CA10 CA13 CA14 CA10 CA13 CA14 No Rxdiv No Rxdiv No Rxdiv Rxdiv Rxdiv Rxdiv

where I is the identity matrix, Ec=Es/SF , Es is the symbol energy, K is the number of codes used by the considered user, SF is the spreading factor and Hq+L is the (q+L)th column of the channel matrix H. As shown in (3) this equalizer is independent to the used spreading codes. Similar expression to (3) could be obtained when two receive antennas are considered [8]. B. Link level layer outputs The HS-DSCH performance evaluation at the link layer consists into providing by simulations the average throughput for each signal to noise ratio defined as
SNR = SF .K .E c , N0

(4)

-10

10 20 Sum of code SNR (dB)

30

40

50

Figure 1. UE category 10, 13 and 14 throughputs with advanced receivers

III.

EVALUATING FUTURE HSDPA MOBILES

20/40 W

Backoff power HS-DSCH Dedicated channels 1 HS-SCCH Other common channels CPICH power Figure 2. Transmit power budget Transmit power without HSDPA

To assess the performance of different HSDPA mobile categories, one can assess two ways: drive test measurements, and simulations. The first is an accurate way to get a good insight into the user-experienced throughputs. However, this method requires that terminals, or at least prototypes, are available. This is obviously not the case for future mobiles, for instance 19.2 Mbps mobiles, which are not available at all today. Therefore, the classical method that is used by network operators to assess the performances of the yet-to-be-released HSDPA mobiles consists in running network simulations using a cell planning tool. This is what had been done in [9]. However, although simulations are the only way to get an insight into the performances of future mobiles, it turns out that they have several drawbacks. Indeed, lack of accuracy in the digital terrain maps, poor base station antenna patterns modeling, errors in the site database, can lead to unreliable results. A method based on measurement samples from drive tests has been proposed in [10]. In our study, we reuse this idea to use drive test measurements samples, and we bring several improvements to it. First, the full load assumption used is removed, and replaced by the actual network load conditions, which are more realistic. Second, a software tool has been developed to run the calculations for each measurement sample, which are then displayed on the digital map using MapInfo tool. This last point makes the method a real alternative to classical simulations with a cell planning tool, at least for coverage evaluation. Indeed, cell planning tools remain the only way to assess the coverage improvement from site additions, sector additions, and tilt or azimuth changes. IV. THROUGHPUT EVALUATION METHODOLOGY

On the other hand, the total received power by the user equipment, I0, is calculated simply by writing EcCPICH/I0 definition:
I 0 = RSCP E CPICH . c I0

(6)

Using (5) and (6) the inter-cell interference, Ioc, is then calculated simply by writing the definition of the total received interference I0 in linear domain:

I oc = I 0 - I or - N 0 .

(7)

Now the HS-DSCH received power is calculated from the pilot received signal, and from the transmit power offset between the HS-DSCH channel and the CPICH:
PT HS E c -DSCH = RSCP + 10 log HS-DSCH PT CPICH

(8)

where PTHS-DSCH is the HS-DSCH transmit power. Again, the calculation is possible because the power offsets between HS-DSCH and CPICH are the same at the receiver's side and at the transmitter's side, the latest being known. B. HS-DSCH Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) Intra-cell interference comes from the loss of orthogonality in the frequency selective channel. This property loss amount is represented by a coefficient that is channel-specific: the channel orthogonality factor. Intra-cell interference is the total received power from the serving cell, multiplied by (1-), where is the channel orthogonality factor. is specific to each location. However, it is not available from the measurement equipments used for the drive tests. Measurements in a laboratory have therefore been made using a multipath simulator, for a standardized channel model (Pedestrian-A 3 km/h), and give a typical value; which is used in our calculations for each location. The SNRHS-DSCH is calculated by writing SNR definition:
E HS - DSCH c SNR HS - DSCH = 10 log SF HS - DSCH . (1 - )I or + I oc + N o (9).

A. Drive test results processing The drive tests provide CPICH received signal code power (RSCP) and EcCPICH/I0 which is the received chip energy EcCPICH relative to the total power spectral density I0. In the following we describe the method to obtain the Ior, Ioc and EcHS-DSCH needed to estimate the HS-DSCH signal to noise ratio. The total received power Ior from the serving cell excluding HSDPA power, can be calculated from the RSCP and from the transmit power offset between the common and dedicated channels, and the CPICH. Indeed, since all the channels go through the same propagation channel, the power offsets at the receiver's side are the same as the power offsets defined at the transmitter's side, which are known. The power budget at the transmitter's side is given in Figure 2. The Ior can be written in dBm as:
PT I or = RSCP + 10 log T P CPICH ,

(5)

It is important to note that intra-cell interference for HSDPA is not included in Ior because this interference is already considered in the link-level simulations. C. Throughput evaluation Throughput is then directly obtained from the SNRHS-DSCH using look-up tables from the link-level simulations such the

where PT is the transmit power without HSDPA and PTCPICH is the CPICH transmit power.

curves of figure 1. The correspondence is simply done by identifying each computed SNR (9) to the link level one (4). The optimal throughput, provided by the link level look-up tables, is hence selected. It is important to remind that the results given in this paper are available for a user that:

Is alone on its TTI: there is no code multiplexing between users (one user served at a time). Is scheduled every TTI, or served during a sufficient time to allow a relevant averaging of the fast fading.

14 maximum throughputs become 14 Mbps and 15 Mbps but the UE 10 achieves its maximum throughput 12.3 Mbps. It's interesting to note that the average throughput of the UE 10 still the best thanks to the efficient link adaptation. However, in the other cases all UE categories have the same throughputs (maximum, minimum and average).
TABLE II. Parameter Multipath channel Orthogonality factor Mobile noise figure Mobile antenna gain Base station maximum transmit power Pmax CPICH transmit power
SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Value Pedestrian-A 3km/h 0,14 for LMMSE 8 dB 0 dBi 43 dBm/46 dBm 31 dBm

D. Discussion As explained above, the evaluation method used here is as accurate as possible since it is based on drive test measurements. However, some modelling estimates are still there: first, throughput is predicted for a probe mobile. This mobile is assumed not to change the network load conditions. In reality, it generates a slight increase of the network downlink load. Second, a multipath model (Pedestrian-A 3 km/h) is used. This model represents well urban cells, but can be a bit pessimistic for areas that are close to lineof-sight conditions, where it can overestimate intra-cell interference. Nevertheless, the evaluation method that has been described here turns out to be a very accurate way to get an estimate of the performance of future mobiles that will be used in the network as it is today. V. SIMULATION SCENARIOS AND RESULT

A. Scenarios and Drive test measurements The considered mobile categories are 10, 13 and 14, and their peak throughput are respectively 14.4 Mbps, 16.2 Mbps and 19.2 Mbps. We propose to evaluate the performance of these categories in macro-cell environment with LMMSE equalizer with receiver diversity. The measurement campaign has been carried out in the centre of a major European town. The drive test area is around 1 sq. kms. Most of the sites that have been rolled out in that area are tri-sectorial ones, but some are bi-sectorial. Cells are all macro- ones. We use around 4000 drive test samples. RSCP and EcCPICH /I0 have been measured during the drive tests. The results are combined to link level outputs respecting the parameters described in table II. B. Simulation results and discussion Figure 3 shows the throughputs for the different mobile categories when the total transmit power is 43 dBm (i.e 20 Watt) which is the typical maximum power of Node B that are in operation today. It is important to mention that the UE-10 maximum achieved throughput is higher than the others one. Indeed the received SNR does not exceed 24 dB and as mentioned before the link adaptation is bad for UE 13-14 for this SNR range. To take benefit of the release 7 UE categories, we increase the transmitting power to 46 dBm (i.e. 40Watt) and we keep the common pilot channel power constant. The obtained throughputs are shown in figure 4. The UE categories 13 and

The complementary cumulative density functions (CCDF) for different UE is shown in Figure 5. These functions give the percentage of area where this throughput (or a higher one) can be achieved. By Using UE category 10 we have better coverage than UE 13-14 even the maximum throughput (14.5 Mbps) is not achieved by the throughput. Indeed, most SNR in the considered areas are lower than 26 dB which makes link adaptation more precise for UE 10. The gap between the CCDF can be reduced when signaling channels are used to specify to the mobile that other intermediate MCSs are used to make the link adaptation more efficient for UE13-14. However in figure 6, the screenshot shows that only few positions lead to achieve throughput higher than 12 Mbps and hence only few position will take benefits of the 64QAM improvement.

Figure 3. Troughput comparison for UE 10, 13 and 14 for Pmax =20 Watt

The release 7 categories bring no improvement in macrocell environment when the maximum transmitting power is 20 Watt. However by increasing this power to 40 Watt and using a dedicated frequency carrier, the UE 13-14 give very interesting

throughput enhancement. Increasing the power assumes that the network load still constant which could be the case since this HSDPA technology is based on an opportunistic approach that can avoid the simultaneous load increase in the network.

environment and MIMO cases are planed to be studied and better performance of UE13-14 is expected.

Trisectorial radio sites

Figure 4. Troughput comparison for UE 10, 13 and 14 for Pmax=40 Watt

Drive test road 1 kilometer Figure 6. Single user HSDPA virtual drive test throuputs (Mbps) LMMSE with receiver diversity UE category 14.

REFERENCES
[1] 3GPP TS 25.214 V7.7.0: Physical layer procedures (FDD), release 7 11/2007. [2] P. Krauss, M. D. Zoltowski, G. leus, Simple MMSE Equalizers for CDMA Downlink to Restore Chip Sequence Comparison to ZeroForcing and Rake, Proc. IEEE ICASSP, Vol. 5 , 5-9 June 2000. [3] Love, R., Stewart, K., Bachu, R., Ghosh, A.; MMSE equalizer for UMTS HSDPA in IEEE VTC 2003-Fall. Vol. 4, Oct. Pages:2416 2420. [4] Y.-P. E. Wang, J.-F. Cheng, and Englund, The benefits of advanced receivers for high speed data communications in WCDMA, in IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference 2002 Fall, Vancouver, Canada, September 2002, pp. 132-136. [5] Love, R.; Ghosh, A.; Weimin X.; Ratasuk R. Performance of 3GPP high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) , in IEEE VTC Fall. 2004 Vol. 5, Sept. Pages:3359 3363. [6] J. Peisa, S. Wager, M. Sgfors, J. Torsner, B. Gransson, T. Fulghum, C. Cozzo and S. Grant High Speed Packet Access Evolution Concept and Technologies Proc. IEEE VTC Spring 2007. [7] M. Malkowski Link Level Comparison of IP-OFDMA (Mobile WIMAX) and UMTS HSDPA in IEEE PIMRC 2007. [8] J.B. Landre, A. Saadani, Hsdpa 14,4 Mbps mobiles Realistic throughputs evaluation Proc. IEEE VTC fall 2008. [9] J.B. Landre, A. Saadani, Receive diversity and LMMSE equalization benefits for HSDPA: realistic network throughputs, in IEEE PIMRC, Sept. 2007, Athens, Greece. [10] H. Holma, A. Toskala, HSDPA/HSUPA for UMTS: High Speed Radio Access for Mobile Communications, Wiley, May 2006.

Figure 5. CCDF comparison between UE categories 10, 13 and 14 for Pmax=40 Watt

The introduction of non linear advanced receivers based on successive interference cancellation can enhance the performance. VI.
CONCLUSION

Realistic performance of HSDPA new UE categories 13-14 are shown in this paper for a macro cell environment. There is not a real gain compared to release 5 UE category 10 for a base station with maximum transmitting power of 20 Watt. However by increasing this power the maximum achieved throughput is 15 Mbps which is lower than its maximum capability (19.2 Mbps) but still a high performance. The derived performance assumes the use of the LMMSE equalizer with the receiver diversity otherwise all the UE categories achieve the same performance. In future works the indoor