Throughput and spectral efficiency analysis in 3G FDD WCDMA cellular systems

Multimedia applications require from wireless communications service providers to support service mix traffic (voice, data, and real time audio/video) to the end wireless subscriber. Wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) has been chosen as a basic radio access technology for the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System/ International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (UMTS/IMT- 2000) to support multimedia services. Throughput and spectral efficiency are fundamental parameters in capacity planning for 3G cellular network deployments. In this paper, we investigate the downlink (DL) aggregate user average throughput and spectral efficiency performance of the standard universal mobile telecommunications system terrestrial radio access WCDMA frequency-division duplex (UTRA WCDMA FDD) system for different scenarios of user population density, coverage area and frequency reuse factor in a cellular environment. A standard 19-basestation cellular architecture is used in our analysis. Our analysis reveals that the aggregate user throughput performance is fluctuating as a result of changes in cell size, channel bandwidth, frequency reuse and subscribers density. Therefore, very careful network capacity planning is needed in order to operate the WCDMA FDD networks in a cost-effective manner.