INTRODUCTION TO WCDMA

A Presentation by Stanley Obiagwu

CONTENTS
Requirements of 3G Systems

Main Differences Between WCDMA and GSM Air Interfaces Services Supported by UMTS Quality of Service Differentiation In UMTS Principles of the WCDMA Air interface

Requirements of 3G Systems
Bit rates up to 2Mbps.

Variable bit rate to offer bandwidth on demand.

Multiplexing of services with different quality requirements on a single connection, e.g. speech, video and packet data.

Delay requirements from delay-sensitive real time trafc to exible best-effort packet data. Quality requirements from 10 % frame error rate to 10-6 bit error rate.

Requirements of 3G Systems (contd)

Co-existence of second and third generation systems and inter-system handovers for coverage enhancements and load balancing. Support of asymmetric uplink and downlink traffic, e.g. web browsing causes more loading to downlink than to uplink.
High spectrum efficiency.

Co-existence of FDD and TDD modes. (The TDD mode is used in unpaired regions of the frequency spectrum.)

Existing Frequency Allocations Around 2GHz

2 GHz band spectrum allocation in Europe, Japan, Korea and USA (MSS=mobile satellite spectrum).

Main Differences Between WCDMA and GSM Air Interfaces

WCDMA Carrier spacing 5MHz GSM 200 kHz

Frequency reuse factor Power control frequency

Quality control

1 1500 Hz

118 2 Hz or lower

Radio resource management Network planning algorithms (frequency planning)

Frequency diversity

5MHz bandwidth gives multipath diversity with Rake receiver Load-based packet scheduling
Supported for improving downlink capacity

Frequency hopping

Packet data
Downlink transmit diversity

Time slot based scheduling with GPRS

Not supported by the standard, but can be applied

The differences in the air interface reect the new requirements of the third generation systems

Services Supported by UMTS

Person-to-Person Services Circuit Switched AMR Speech Service Video Telephony Packet Switched Images and Multimedia Push-to-Talk over Cellular (PoC) Voice over IP (VoIP) Multiplayer Games Content-to-person Services Browsing Audio and Video Streaming Content Download Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service(MBMS) Business Connectivity

Quality of Service Differentiation In UMTS

There are 4 traffic classes: Conversational (e.g. AMR speech & video telephony), Streaming (e.g. video and audio streaming), Interactive (e.g. web browsing and file download) and Background (e.g. SMS). When the system load gets higher, it becomes important to prioritise the different services according to their requirements. This prioritisation is called QoS differentiation. The main distinguishing factor between the four traffic classes is how delay-sensitive the traffic is.

Principles of the WCDMA Air interface

Summary of the Main Properties of WCDMA
WCDMA is a wideband Direct-Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DSCDMA) system. The chip rate of 3.84Mcps leads to a carrier bandwidth of approximately 5MHz. WCDMA supports highly variable user data rates, in other words the concept of obtaining Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) is well supported. WCDMA supports two basic modes of operation: Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD). In the FDD mode, separate 5MHz carrier frequencies are used for the uplink and downlink respectively, whereas in TDD only one 5MHz is time-shared between the uplink and downlink.

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Summary of the Main Properties of WCDMA (contd)
WCDMA supports the operation of asynchronous base stations, so that, unlike in the synchronous IS-95 system, there is no need for a global time reference such as a GPS.

WCDMA employs coherent detection on uplink and downlink based on the use of pilot symbols or common pilot. Use of advanced CDMA receiver concepts, such as multiuser detection and smart adaptive antennas to increase capacity and/or coverage.

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Spreading and Despreading in DS-CDMA

User data is here assumed to be a BPSK-modulated bit sequence of rate R, the user data bits assuming the values of +1/-1.

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Spreading and Despreading in DS-CDMA (contd)
The increase of the signalling rate by a factor of 8 corresponds to a widening (by a factor of 8) of the occupied spectrum of the spread user data signal. Due to this virtue, CDMA systems are more generally called spread spectrum systems.

The factor by which the signal is spread is termed spreading factor; in this case, it is equal to 8. Despreading restores a bandwidth proportional to R for the signal.

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Principles of the Correlation Receiver

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Principles of the Correlation Receiver
The result of multiplying the interfering signal with the own code and integrating the resulting products leads to interfering signal values lingering around 0. As can be seen, the amplitude of the own signal increases on average by a factor of 8 relative to that of the user of the other interfering system, i.e. the correlation detection has raised the desired user signal by the spreading factor, here 8, from the interference present in the CDMA system. This effect is termed processing gain and is a fundamental aspect of all CDMA systems, and in general of all spread spectrum systems.

Processing gain is what gives CDMA systems the robustness against self-interference that is necessary in order to reuse the available 5MHz carrier frequencies over geographically close distances.

Principles of the WCDMA air interface

Multipath Propagation
Radio propagation in the land mobile channel is characterised by multiple reections, diffractions and attenuation of the signal energy, resulting in multipath propagation. Multipath propagation leads to fast fading (Rayleigh fading) of the transmitted signal.

Multipath propagation leads to a multipath delay profile.

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Countermeasures Against Fading in WCDMA
The delay dispersive energy is combined by utilising multiple Rake ngers (correlation receivers) allocated to those delay positions on which signicant energy arrives.
Fast power control and the inherent diversity reception of the Rake receiver are used to mitigate the problem of fading signal power. Strong coding and interleaving and retransmission protocols are used to add redundancy and time diversity to the signal and thus help the receiver in recovering the user bits across fades.

Note : A collection of correlation receivers, termed ngers, is what comprises the (W)CDMA Rake receiver.

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Power Control
Tight and fast power control is perhaps the most important aspect in WCDMA, in particular on the uplink. Without it, a single overpowered mobile could block a whole cell.
Solution is in the form of closed loop transmission power control.

Closed loop (fast) power control in WCDMA

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Power Control (contd)
Outer loop power control adjusts the target SIR setpoint in the base station according to the needs of the individual radio link and aims at a constant quality, usually dened as a certain target bit error rate (BER) or block error rate (BLER).

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Softer Handovers
During softer handover, a mobile station is in the overlapping cell coverage area of two adjacent sectors of a base station. The communications between mobile station and base station take place concurrently via two air interface channels, one for each sector separately.

Softer handover

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Soft Handovers
During soft handover, a mobile station is in the overlapping cell coverage area of two (or more sectors) belonging to different base stations. As in softer handover, the communications between mobile station and base stations take place concurrently via two (or more) air interface channels from each base station separately.

Soft handover

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

UTRA FDD Radio Interface Protocol Architecture

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Transport Channels and their Mapping to the Physical Channels

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Two types of transport channel exist: dedicated channels and common channels. The main difference between them is that a common channel is a resource divided between all or a group of users in a cell, whereas a dedicated channel resource, identied by a certain code on a certain frequency, is reserved for a single user only.

Common Channels: Broadcast Channel (BCH), Forward Access Channel (FACH), Paging Channel (PCH), Random Access Channel (RACH), Uplink Common Packet Channel (CPCH), and Downlink Shared Channel (DSCH).

Principles of the WCDMA Air Interface

Scrambling
This is needed to separate terminals or base stations from each other.

Scrambling is used on top of spreading, so it does not change the signal bandwidth but only makes the signals from different sources separable from each other.

Relationship between spreading and scrambling

END