Practical Chip-level Equalizers in HSDPA

High-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) has been developed to upgrade the current WCDMA system in yerms of providing a higher data rate for mobile users. To ensure a downlink speed of up to 14Mbps, the HSDPA system has three main features: adaptive modulation and coding, a hybrid automatic repeat request, and fast scheduling. Because standard documents describe only the specifications of Node B, various kinds of HSDPA receivers cen be used with different architectures. An ordinary receiver generally has a rake architecture, though a rake receiver is not good at reducing multiple access interference (MAI). The performance of rake receiver is indispensably deteriorated when the number of mobile users in the system increases. Conversely, an equalizer can alleviate the MAI significantly at the expense of complexity and can therefore be an alternative solution for a rake receiver in a HSDPA system. In this paper, the performance of several equalizers of a HSDPA system is compared in terms of several implementation issues. The simulation results provide useful information about proper equalizers for different design purposes with respect to the performance and complexity trade-off.