HSOPA
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This article contains information about a scheduled or expected future product. It may contain preliminary or speculative information, and may not reflect the final version of the product. |
High Speed OFDM Packet Access (HSOPA) is a proposed part of 3GPP's Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for UMTS systems. If adopted, HSOPA succeeds HSDPA and HSUPA technologies specified in 3GPP releases 5 and 6. Unlike HSDPA or HSUPA, HSOPA is an entirely new air interface system, unrelated to and incompatible with W-CDMA.
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[edit] Features
HSOPA has the following features:
- Flexible bandwidth usage with 1.25MHz to 20MHz bandwidths. By comparison, W-CDMA uses fixed size 5MHz chunks of spectrum.
- Increased spectral efficiency at 2-4 times more than in 3GPP release 6, peak transfer rates of 100Mbps for downlink and 50Mbps for uplink.
- Latency times of around 20 ms for round trip time from user terminal to RAN, approximately the same as a combined HSDPA/HSUPA system, but much better than "classic" W-CDMA.
[edit] Design
Originally proposed by Nortel, HSOPA uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology to support up to 10 times as many users as W-CDMA based systems, with lower processing power required on each handset.[1]. Still in development, experimental performance is 37Mbps in the downlink over a 5MHz channel, close to the theoretical maximum of 40Mbps.
[edit] Rationale for HSOPA
A working version of HSOPA will help achieve the goals set by the 3GPP LTE project. The improvements in performance this implies will allow wireless operators to offer 'quadruple play' services - voice, high-speed interactive applications including large data transfer and feature-rich IPTV with full mobility.
Although UMTS, with HSDPA and HSUPA, delivers high data transfer rates, wireless data usage is expected to increase significantly over the next few years. The emergence of competitive technologies, such as WiMAX, is driving UMTS operators to upgrade their networks to support better data rates.
As a part of UMTS, HSOPA would be designed to provide a simple evolution path for UMTS service providers, providing increases in data speeds, and spectral efficiency, and allowing the provision of more functionality.
For most situations, the cost to evolve a UMTS network to a next generation air interface, including HSOPA, will be minimal compared to the cost of deploying a new network, as most of the existing infrastructure will remain the same, requiring only major upgrades at a tower level and on handsets.
HSOPA demonstrations and trials are planned in 2007.
[edit] Competive technologies
[edit] WiMAX vs HSOPA
As both systems are using air interfaces radically different from those already deployed, neither standard can operate in the same physical spectrum as prior standards, though an FDD version of HSOPA can share licensed cellular spectrum allocations as long as those allocations are greater than the 6.25MHz (5MHz for W-CDMA and 1.25MHz for HSOPA) minimum required for both standards to co-exist.
In practice, most UMTS networks should be possible to migrate at the tower level to HSOPA without the need to obtain more spectrum, except where legal barriers exist preventing the use of non-IMT-2000 air interface technologies.
A major reason for the shift from CDMA is the ability of OFDM to make better use of MIMO and AAS multi-antenna and signal path technologies. Debates about core spectral efficiencies are dwarfed by improvements already achievable via the use of MIMO and limited AAS. The evolutionary road map of wireless calls for greater gains from the synergistic combination of these technologies.
While both WiMAX and the HSOPA use OFDM/OFDMA, HSOPA enhanced UMTS will most likely be optimized for wide area mobile voice communications. HSOPA will use OFDMA for the down-link and SC-OFDM (Single Carrier OFDM) for the up-link. WiMAX/802.16e-2005 uses OFDMA for both the up and down links.
SC-OFDM can maintain connections at longer distance but has lower bandwidth than OFDMA. However, WiMAX advocates perceive evolution of WBB as also shifting the 'architectural evolution' of wireless networks to more granular, symmetrical, higher bandwidth micro-cell and mobile multi-hop relay network topologies.
Multi-mode WiMAX plus CDMA and other technologies can work together to fulfill both long range, low bandwidth and shorter range, high bandwidth requirements on the basis of providing the user with 'always best connected' experience.
[edit] References
- ^ HSOPA: Exploiting OFDM and MIMO to take UMTS beyond HSDPA/HSUPA (Philippe Duplessis, Nortel)
