Experiments on fast sector selection with entire-bandwidth assignment in forward link for OFCDM broadband packet wireless access

This work presents experimental results on fast sector selection (FSS) with entire-bandwidth assignment in the forward link for orthogonal frequency and code division multiplexing (OFCDM) broadband packet access. We first elucidate that the additional improvement derived from FSS with independent frequency-block assignment by taking advantage of frequency-selective fading compared to FSS with entire-bandwidth assignment is small from the viewpoint of the received signal level when the number of frequency-block is not large. Then, we investigate the effect of FSS with entire-bandwidth assignment in laboratory and field experiments considering the application of key techniques for high-speed packet access such as hybrid ARQ with packet combining, soft-decision turbo decoding, and pilot channel-assisted channel estimation. Field experiments, which are conducted in an urban area near Tokyo, show that by applying FSS, the required signal power at the average residual packet error rate (PER) of 10^-3 can be reduced by approximately 2.0 and 1.0 dB compared to the case without FSS when the maximum number of retransmissions in Incremental redundancy is 0 and 1, respectively.