UE receive diversity as a performance enhancement to 3GPP Rel99, Rel5 and Rel6 radio features

This paper discusses the radio performance improvements that handsets with two-antenna receive diversity can bring about to 3GPP Rel99, Rel5 and Rel6 WCDMA systems. The scope of this study is to offer a comprehensive picture of the UE receive diversity gains when dual antenna reception is used along with Rel99 radio features, e.g. soft handover, Rel5 HSDPA functionality, e.g. hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ), and Rel6 MBMS radio features, e.g. longer interleaving time. The receive diversity gains have been investigated with the use of 3GPP compliant link level simulators and through analytical calculations to evaluate the system capacity and coverage enhancements. The results of this investigation show that UE receive diversity with 0.5 antenna correlation can increase Rel99 system capacity by around 85%, Rel5 HSDPA cell throughput by 40% and can reduce by 60% the NodeB transmission power for Rel6 MBMS 64 kbit/s user data services.