On Serving Cell Change Reliability in HSDPA Network

In Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) networks the Signaling Radio Bearer (SRB) is transmitted downlink to inform the user i.a. when it needs to make a handover. When transmitting e.g. Voice over IP (VoIP) on High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) SRB is mapped on HSDPA user data channel, high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) in order to maximize voice capacity. The lack of support for soft handover (SHO) of HS-DSCH may compromise the reception of SRB and thus also a possible incoming serving HSDPA cell change command especially at the cell borders. This can lead to serious VoIP service degradation due to prolonged camping on a poor cell and in the worst case even to call dropping, if the cell change command is not received before VoIP call drop criterion is met. This paper considers the performance of SRB transmission on source cell HS-DSCH during a handover process. Also a strategy of transmitting the serving cell change command from the target cell is analyzed. The study is done by the means of fully dynamic system simulations and they consider both macro-cell and manhattan scenarios. The results show that a relatively low SRB/handover error rate is experienced in a macro cell scenario but in a more challenging manhattan scenario the error rate is higher. Transmitting the serving cell change command from the target cell HS-SCCH results in similar handover failure rates in manhattan scenario than using SRB on HS-DSCH in macro-cell scenario when static power allocation for HS-SCCH is in use.