Dual Cell HSDPA Application Performance

Dual Cell HSDPA (DC-HSDPA), which was introduced in Release 8 of the WCDMA specifications, enables the User Equipment (UE) to receive downlink data on two adjacent carriers simultaneously. Although the user physical layer throughput is expected to double compared to a single carrier HSDPA (SC-HSDPA) system, it is not quite clear how this would translate to user experience for realistic applications in various operating scenarios, i.e. channel conditions and loading. We implemented DC- HSDPA functionality in a prototype and evaluated its performance for various applications in comparison with SC-HSDPA. Our results show that, with DC-HSDPA, realistic applications such as web browsing and video streaming see significant gains in lab as well as OTA environments compared to SC-HSDPA with or without loading due to other users. Our results also highlight the ability of DC-HSDPA UEs to improve application performance by taking advantage of uneven loading across carriers, which may result due to UEs operating on a single carrier.