HSUPA Performance in Indoor Environments

Pedro Miguel Cardoso

Key information

Authors:

Pedro Miguel Cardoso (Pedro Miguel Cardoso Ferreira)

Supervisors:

António José Castelo Branco Rodrigues (António José Castelo Branco Rodrigues)

Published in

November 12, 2009

Abstract

The present dissertation intends to study the performance of High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) in a commercial network, in indoor scenarios with different coverage solutions: indoor coverage provided by outdoor sites, indoor dedicated site, optical repeater and Radio Frequency (RF) repeater. For each test scenario three locations with different characteristics were tested, by performing extensive FTP uploads. These tests were performed using a power class 3 HSUPA compatible category 3 UE. With this test setup a maximum throughput of 1,45 Mbps can be expected at the air interface. From the tests a group of metrics were collected in order to evaluate the performance and network impact of the tested service: received signal strength, receive signal quality, UE transmission power, received total wideband noise and data throughput. Based on the collected results one can confirm the major upgrade brought by HSUPA to the uplink data transfers in UMTS, with average application throughputs close to 1,2 Mbps. The impact on the cell noise rise was in general small, though there is a clear difference between the scenarios with and without repeaters, especially the optical repeater scenario.