HSDPA Capacity Gain in the 900 MHz Band

In this paper, we evaluate analytically the capacity gain if we use the HSDPA system in band VIII. This work is based on a statistical approach that calculates the cell capacity knowing the throughput at each distance to the base station. This throughput is obtained by thorough simulations that take into account the propagation, environment (urban/rural, indoor/outdoor) and different mobile categories. We find out that, while a large coverage gain can be expected in all situations, large capacity gains are obtained whenever the system is limited by noise rather than interference (e.g. in deep indoor situations or in rural environments). These capacity gains result, not only from propagation issues, but also from the statistical nature of elastic traffic where a larger throughput alleviates the load of the network, leading thus to even larger throughputs and capacity.