HSDPA increases the downlink data rate within a cell to a theoretical maximum of 14 Mbit/s, with 2 Mbit/s on the uplink. However, it is not about delivering Ethernet bandwidth to one fortunate user. What is important is the ability to deliver, reliably, many sessions of high-speed, bursty data to a large number of users within that cell. The changes that HSDPA enables include better quality and more reliable, more robust data services. In other words, while realistic data rates may only be a few megabit per second, the actual quality and number of users achieved will improve significantly.
Burst Problems
IP is a bursty protocol that demands changes to the wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) protocol stack to support IP efficiently. Bursty protocols provide a poor fit with the dedicated channel (DCH) that is used in existing W-CDMA networks. Although the DCH can support many different types of traffic, the utilization of the channel for bursty traffic is typically quite low. This is because the process of channel reconfiguration that can be used to tune the DCH for a change in traffic mix traffic is a slow process, taking on the order of 500 ms.
These issues have been addressed in Release 5 of the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) standards, which radically changes the network to make it far better suited to data traffic. Support for IPv6 has been incorporated into the core network together with a key enhancement to provide high-bandwidth support for bursty IP traffic for the mobile user.
Instead of sending data using individual DCHs, HSDPA extends the downlink shared channel (DSCH), allowing packets destined for many users to be shared on one, higher-bandwidth channel called the high-speed DSCH (HS-DSCH). As with wired networks such as Ethernet, this allows for the more efficient utilization of the available bandwidth. On top of that, a faster channel configuration process allows the basestation to control the channel more effectively, further improving efficiency Figure 1.
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