Performance of uplink packet services in WCDMA

In this paper, we study the operation of release´99 packet scheduler of the UMTS system. We focus on the uplink direction of data transmission. The aim is to investigate the performance of the packet scheduler data scheduling on dedicated transport channels. We emphasize in particular a power based packet scheduler (PS) with fair resource sharing. The PS performance has been evaluated in a time-dynamic network simulator with packet data users characterized by a bursty source traffic model. We shortly describe the source traffic model and the network simulator. The results concentrate on the uplink noise rise (NR) behavior for different settings of PS related timers and show that a reduction of some of these timers to allow faster scheduling can increase the network capacity. However, the results also demonstrate that this potential capacity gain is achievable only for bursty and high user equipment (UE) source data rate.