Efficient Synchronous Transmissions using Soft-Combining for Paging Channel in OFDM Based Evolved UTRA Downlink

This paper proposes synchronous transmission with delay diversity and soft-combining reception in the same node B for the paging channel (PCH) and paging indicator (PI) information in the OFDM based evolved UTRA downlink. In the proposed transmission scheme, the PCH and PI information are received through soft-combining from two contiguous sectors within the same node B, to improve the received signal-to-interference plus noise power ratio (SINR) without mutual inter-sector interference. Computer simulation results show that in a three-sectored cell, the required number of channel symbols per information bit at the average packet error rate (PER) of 10^-2 using soft-combining reception with a sector-common pilot can be decreased by approximately 10-20% compared to that without soft-combining at the 5% outage probability when the inter-site distance is 500 or 1732 m. Furthermore, in a six-sectored cell, the amount of the required radio resources at the average PER of 10^-2 using soft-combining reception can be reduced by approximately 30 % compared to the case without soft-combining. These results show the effectiveness of the proposed method from the viewpoint of the increase in coverage of the PCH