HSOPA

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from High Speed OFDM Packet Access)

This article contains information about a scheduled or expected future product.
It may contain preliminary information that does not reflect the final version of the product.

Mobile phone and data
standards

GSM / UMTS Family

GSM
GPRS
EDGE (EGPRS)
HSCSD

Pre-4G

UMTS Revision 8
- LTE
- HSOPA (Super 3G)

cdmaOne / CDMA2000 Family

cdmaOne

Pre-4G

Other Technologies

Pre-4G

Frequency bands

High Speed OFDM Packet Access (HSOPA) is a proposed part of 3GPP's Long Term Evolution (LTE) upgrade path for UMTS systems. HSOPA is also often referred to as Super 3G. If adopted, HSOPA succeeds HSDPA and HSUPA technologies specified in 3GPP releases 5 and 6. Unlike HSDPA or HSUPA, HSOPA is an entirely new air interface system, unrelated to and incompatible with W-CDMA.

1 Features
2 Design
3 Rationale for HSOPA
4 Technology demos
5 Deployment
6 Competitive technologies
- 6.1 WiMAX vs HSOPA
7 References
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Features

HSOPA has the following features:

Flexible bandwidth usage with 1.25 MHz to 20 MHz bandwidths. By comparison, W-CDMA uses fixed size 5 MHz chunks of spectrum.
Increased spectral efficiency at 2-4 times more than in 3GPP release 6, peak transfer rates of 100 Mbit/s for downlink and 50 Mbit/s for uplink.
Latency times of around 20 ms for round trip time from user terminal to RAN, approximately the same as a combined HSDPA/HSUPA system, but much better than "classic" W-CDMA.

[edit] Design

HSOPA uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology to support up to 10 times as many users as W-CDMA based systems, with lower processing power required on each handset^[1]. Still in development, experimental performance is 37 Mbit/s in the downlink over a 5 MHz channel, close to the theoretical maximum of 40 Mbit/s.

[edit] Rationale for HSOPA

A working version of HSOPA will help achieve the goals set by the 3GPP LTE project. The improvements in performance this implies will allow wireless operators to offer 'quadruple play' services - voice, high-speed interactive applications including large data transfer and feature-rich IPTV with full mobility.

Although UMTS, with HSDPA and HSUPA, delivers high data transfer rates, wireless data usage is expected to increase significantly over the next few years. The emergence of competitive technologies, such as WiMAX, is driving UMTS operators to upgrade their networks to support better data rates.

As a part of UMTS, HSOPA would be designed to provide a simple evolution path for UMTS service providers, providing increases in data speeds, and spectral efficiency, and allowing the provision of more functionality.

For most situations, the cost to evolve a UMTS network to a next generation air interface, including HSOPA, will be minimal compared to the cost of deploying a new network, as most of the existing infrastructure will remain the same, requiring only major upgrades at a tower level and on handsets.

[edit] Technology demos

HSOPA demonstrations and trials are planned for the year 2007 and onwards.

Researchers in Heinrich Hertz Institute, a research division of the German government-founded Fraunhofer Institute have demonstrated 100 Mbit/s transfer speeds.^[2]

[edit] Deployment

NTT DoCoMo of Japan plans to launch new network based on HSOPA technology by 2010. The network upgrade will cost 200 billion yen ($1.7 billion USD/1.3 billion euros).^[3]

[edit] Competitive technologies

[edit] WiMAX vs HSOPA

As both systems use air interfaces radically different from those already deployed, neither standard can operate in the same physical spectrum as prior standards, though an FDD version of HSOPA can share licensed cellular spectrum allocations as long as those allocations are greater than the 6.25 MHz (5 MHz for W-CDMA and 1.25 MHz for HSOPA) minimum required for both standards to co-exist.

In practice, most UMTS networks should be possible to migrate at the tower level to HSOPA without the need to obtain more spectrum, except where legal barriers exist preventing the use of non-IMT-2000 air interface technologies.

A major reason for the shift from CDMA is the ability of OFDM to make better use of MIMO and AAS multi-antenna and signal path technologies. Debates about core spectral efficiencies are dwarfed by improvements already achievable via the use of MIMO and limited AAS. The evolutionary road map of wireless calls for greater gains from the synergistic combination of these technologies.

While both WiMAX and the HSOPA use OFDM/OFDMA, HSOPA enhanced UMTS will most likely be optimized for wide area mobile voice communications. HSOPA will use OFDMA for the down-link and Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) for the up-link. WiMAX/802.16e-2005 uses OFDMA for both the up and down links.

SC-OFDM can maintain connections at longer distance but has lower bandwidth than OFDMA. However, WiMAX advocates perceive evolution of WBB as also shifting the 'architectural evolution' of wireless networks to more granular, symmetrical, higher bandwidth micro-cell and mobile multi-hop relay network topologies.

Multi-mode WiMAX plus CDMA and other technologies can work together to fulfill both long range, low bandwidth and shorter range, high bandwidth requirements on the basis of providing the user with 'always best connected' experience.