An OFDM evolution for the UMTS high speed downlink packet access

To improve the capacity of the UMTS third-generation cellular system for data services, a high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) has been standardized. To support shared access on the downlink, WCDMA physical channels supporting high peak data rates have been introduced. However, the performance of conventional WCDMA RAKE receivers is limited over multipath channels. Therefore, advanced WCDMA receivers (e.g. MMSE equalizers) can be introduced to improve the performance of HSDPA. Alternatively, in the 3^rd-Generation Partnership Project. the potential benefits of the introduction of OFDM in the UMTS downlink are studied. In this paper we evaluate the performances both of "textbook" OFDM and OFDM/OQAM in an HSDPA context, and compare it to that of WCDMA with RAKE and MMSE receivers. Other aspects related to the impact of the introduction of OFDM, such as system-level evaluation methodologies and receiver complexity, are also investigated.