Orthogonality factor in WCDMA downlinks in urban macrocellular environments

Multipath dispersion leads to the loss of orthogonality between signals transmitted simultaneously on a wide-band code division multiple access (WCDMA) downlink. The orthogonality factor (OF), which models its impact in the link signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) equation, depends - to a large extent - on the power delay profile of the multipath channel between the mobile and its serving base station. We use the comprehensive and general COST259 channel model for urban cellular environments to evaluate the impact on the OF of multipath clusters and distance-dependence of the multipath delay decay time constant, both of which have been observed in several channel measurements. The observed large standard deviation of the OF indicates that using a single value for all users in downlink capacity analyses and simulations, as has been the practice, may lead to erroneous conclusions. We also propose an empirical model to analytically characterize the observed statistics of the OF