Reducing internal and external fragmentations of OVSF codes in WCDMA systems with multiple codes

In the third-generation partnership project technical specification, orthogonal variable spreading factor (OVSF) codes are used as channelization codes. The use of OVSF codes can provide variable data rates to flexibly support applications with different bandwidth requirements. Most works in the literature assume that only one single OVSF code is used to support one connection. This may sometimes waste the scarce wireless bandwidth since the allocated bandwidth will increase exponentially as the spreading factor decreases, i.e., a user may be "overserved." In this paper, we consider the possibility of using multiple OVSF codes to support a connection. We show how using multiple codes can reduce the internal and external fragmentations of an OVSF code tree. The tradeoff between bandwidth utilization and hardware complexity of a multicode system is analyzed. The result shows that using two or three codes will be quite cost effective. Several multicode assignment and reassignment strategies, namely, random, leftmost, crowded-first-space, and crowded-first-code, are proposed based on such an environment. Our simulation results show significant increase in code tree utilization and significant reduction in code blocking probability by using the crowded-first-space and crowded-first-code schemes.