Performance Evaluation of Dual Carrier Feature in the Uplink of HSPA+ Systems

Dual carrier is a feature introduced in HSPA+ that allows scheduling a user on two carriers simultaneously. While this feature has been largely studied, and deployed, in the downlink and it has been proved that it provides significant capacity gains, its performance in the uplink is still to be investigated. This paper fills this gap by estimating the radio capacity improvement provided by dual-carrier feature in the uplink. The proposed method combines link budget simulations to assess the throughputs for a fixed number of users in the cell, and a queuing theory-based statistical capacity model, thereby providing a reliable estimate of the network radio capacity. Simulation results show that dual carrier significantly increases uplink radio capacity.