The effect of single-antenna interference cancellation on GPRS performance

Single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC) is a very interesting and promising technology currently being standardized in 3GPP as part of GERAN Release 6. It is based on the latest developments in advanced receiver design. In the most advantageous interference conditions, SAIC can improve the signal-to-noise ratio over 10 dB. In this paper, we report on a study of the effect of SAIC on the capacity of a typical GSM network in terms of GPRS data throughput. Our results verify that SAIC provides a significant increase in network capacity not only for speech traffic but also for GPRS data traffic. Since current SAIC receiver algorithms are generally optimized for GMSK modulated signals, we were also interested in the proportion of GMSK and 8-PSK signals in a typical GSM network with EDGE data traffic. We found that in the case of a typical distribution of speech, GPRS and EGPRS traffic, the proportion of 8-PSK signals is relatively small. We can therefore expect that EDGE will not significantly diminish the effectiveness of SAIC in GSM networks.