Enhanced UL

In order to fulfil the need for improvement also for UL packet data, Enhanced UL also called HSUPA was introduced in
3GPP Release 6.
A major difference between DL and UL is that for DL there is ONE transmitter per cell, NodeB, whilst for the UL there might be
MANY transmitters, each UE with an active UL, each moving and sending independently. Hence, the DL physical channels will
all be orthogonal- at least at the point of transmission, having channelization codes from the same code tree, and they will be
sharing the available power in the NodeB. In the UL it is not possible to get perfect orthogonality since the senders, UEs, are
moving independently. Every UE has its own channelization code tree and its own battery. As in R99 long scrambling codes,
with low correlation, are used to separate between channels from different transmitters, i.e. NodeBs DL and UEs UL.
In HSDPA the data to different UEs is carried on a shared channel, while in Enhanced UL the data from different users will be
carried on a dedicated channel; transport channel Enhanced Dedicated Channel (E-DCH) mapped onto the physical channel EDCH-Dedicated Physical Data Channel (E-DPDCH) for high data rates more than one E-DPDCH will be used. The E-DPDCH
can use a channelization code with a minimum value of SF = 2. In Release 6 the maximum channel rate for Enhanced UL is 5.8
Mbps, with a peak data rate of 5.4 Mbps, this value is valid for the MAC layer. For Enhanced UL there are two options for TTI, 2
ms or 10 ms.
For Enhanced UL scheduling is still carried out by the NodeB, now the receiving node, while transport format selection is done
by the scheduled UEs, see figure 6. The NodeB will measure the interference level on the UL and receive information about
buffer status in the UEs, and make a decision about which UEs that are to be scheduled. Information about scheduling decision is
delivered in scheduling grants, which also provides information about how much power the UE(s) may use when transmitting.
The higher the power the higher the bitrate, and the interference! In the DL the shared resources are channelization codes and
power, in the UL the shared resource is contribution to the intra-cell interference.

Figure 6 Scheduling, transport format selection and HARQ for Enhanced UL

For Enhanced UL channels soft handover will be used in basically the same way as for R99.
To handle these functions new MAC protocol sublayers are added, MAC-e in NodeB is responsible for scheduling and HARQ,
and MAC-es in RNC to handle reordering of received data from multiple NodeBs in case of soft handover, see figure 7.