Performance Gains of Single-Frequency Dual-Cell HSDPA

In this paper, we will study the scheme of Single-Frequency Dual-Cell HSDPA (SF-DC HSDPA) which is introduced to simultaneously transmit two separate packet streams from two cells to a mobile. The inter-stream interference is suppressed by the linear-MMSE equalizer at the mobile. In the simple implementation studied in this paper, the schedulers at the two cells are independent without information exchange. Our study is based on both analysis and simulations. SF-DC HSDPA offers significantly higher data rates to users in the handover region. It also achieves dynamic load balancing in terms of resource utilizations across cells. Furthermore, all these gains can be obtained without degrading the performance of users not in handover and the legacy users. The gain from SF-DC is particularly substantial for users in heavily loaded cells surrounded by lightly loaded neighboring cells. In addition, such gain can increase with loading at a given loading ratio between the heavily loaded and lightly loaded cells. SF-DC is easy to implement with only incremental complexity to the current mobile and network equipment.