Uplink Flow Level Capacity for HSPA+ Systems

In this paper, we evaluate the capacity gains expected when introducing HSUPA+ capable devices in the network. We first develop a flow level capacity for a cell carrying legacy UMTS devices in addition to HSPA and HSPA+ ones. We show how to calculate the QoS for both real time and elastic traffic using queuing theory analysis. Our model is next applied to assess the user-perceived QoS, i.e. the blocking probability for real time traffic and the throughput percentiles for elastic calls. We thus quantify the gains when introducing HSPA+ devices and identify the deployment scenarios that allow maximizing the operator´s benefits from this introduction.