On achieving the Shannon bound in cellular systems

This contribution provides insight into the performance of the currently deployed 3G cellular systems HSDPA and WiMAX. In extensive measurement campaigns we measured the physical layer throughput of these 3G systems in different environments (alpine and urban) and compare the results rigorously to their upper bounds derived from the well known Shannon capacity. By separating the observed losses into a channel state information loss, a design loss, and an implementation loss, we gain more insight into the performance of the different standards which in turn allows us to compare them better and to localize their shortcomings. In general, we find that implementations of the current standards still operate about 10 dB away from the Shannon bound.