Overview

Course name: HSPA Evolution

Duration: 1 Day

Requirements: Fundamentals of 3G (CMDA, WCDMA, UMTS) and HSPA basics or equivalent knowledge. See our Fundamentals of 3G and HSPA Basics courses for more details.

Overview: Since the initial introduction of cellular High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technologies the market, user and application needs have grown significantly covering variety of new challenges all the way from delivering voice over HSPA and energy efficiency to enabling even lower response times and higher data rates that were originally conceived. The purpose of this course is to cover latest technology advancements and evolutions in the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) domain, also referred as 3.75G or HSPA+.

Objective: After the course the trainees will have general level understanding on latest challenges posed to HSPA networks and how those challenges are addressed through 3GPP HSPA enhancements for uplink and downlink.

Schedule and content

(excluding coffee and lunch breaks)

INTRODUCTION

Warm up (15 mins)
Trainer, company and trainee introduction, discussions related to HSPA constraints, challenges and how those could be addressed. Contents and objectives for the course.

HSPA+ Introduction (25 mins)
Short recap of HSPA, motivation for introducing HSPA+, HSPA+ specific timeline of realeases/features.

HSPA+

Internet-HSPA (10 mins)
All-IP, flat architecture.

Energy efficiency (30 mins)
Terminal and base station power savings, interference reduction, continuous packet connectivity, DRX, DTX, HS-SCCH less.

Multicarrier (20 mins)
Downlink – 8 carriers, uplink – dual carrier, scheduling specifics.

Higher order modulation (10 mins)
Recap of modulation principless and how those apply to HSPA. Case 64QAM.

MIMO (55 mins)
Different ways to use multiple antennas, diversity, beamforming, spatial multiplexing, virtual antenna mapping, multiuser MIMO, codebook design and rank adaptation. Open and closed loop variants for MIMO.

HSPA+ Performance (45 mins)
Performance and analysis methodologies and tools. Going through different performance results and examples + analysis of the factors affecting the real life performance.

Coordinated Multipoint Tranmissions (45 mins)
Different ways to utilize transmissions from multiple base stations. Techniques inlcude multiflow, SF-DC aggregation/switching, DF-4C aggregation/switching, intra/inter-site cases and HS-SFN.

Femtocells (15 mins)
Introduction, use cases and potential problems
HS-FACH / HS-RACH (15 mins)

VoIP in HSPA+ (40 mins)
Networks are moving towards All-IP traffic, that means that voice needs to be carried over IP as well. VoIP requirements, performace criteria and capacity definition. Performance and technologies in HSPA+ for VoIP.

Fast Serving Cell Change (FSCC) (15 mins)
Especially in dense urban areas where coverage can be compromised due to buildings need for rapid and robust cell changes are necessary. Going through solutions to that challenge.

HSPA900 refarming (10 mins)
Motivation, plans, current status, coverage maps

WRAP UP

Discussion and recap (25 mins)
Learnings of the day, key findings, what’s to expect in the future, feedback