Handover and link adaptation evaluation of the RACE/ATDMA system concept for a 3rd generation air interface by simulation

The European RACE/ATDMA project has designed an advanced TDMA radio access scheme for third generation mobile systems. Among the key requirements for these systems are improved quality of service (QoS), and high capacity and coverage. The paper concentrates on the performance evaluation via simulation of two important techniques of the ATDMA system concept against the requirements above: the handover algorithm and link adaptation. The latter is a feature which dynamically adapts the transmission chain (e.g. coding rate, modulation scheme) to the radio channel characteristics. The handover results show performance trade-offs for variations of the handover margin or the dedicated control channel (DCCH) holding time. For link adaptation the system improvements possible by this technique in an interference limited as well as a noise limited situation are given