Transport block error rates for UTRA-FDD downlink with transmission diversity and turbo coding

The transport block error rate (BLER) is an important indicator of the link quality in UTRA. For every kind of service in UTRA a BER or BLER threshold, that still satisfies the desired quality, can be specified. Then, the target E_b/N₀ for that service is the mean E_b/N₀ necessary to guarantee the specified BER or BLER threshold. The knowledge of the target E_b/N₀ for different services and propagation environments is fundamental for setting the outer loop in the power control algorithms, for system capacity calculations, for system planning and for radio resource management (RRM) in general. This paper presents simulation results of the downlink BER and BLER versus E_b/N₀ for different services and propagation environments. UTRA services are characterized by means of the radio access bearer (RAB) tables as specified by 3GPP. Results focus on several relevant RAB, which make use of turbo coding techniques.