Dual Cell-high Speed Downlink Packet Access System Benefits and User Experience Gains

Dual Cell-High Speed Downlink Packet Access (DC-HSDPA), which was introduced in Release 8 of the WCDMA specifications, enables the User Equipment (UE) to receive downlink data on two adjacent carriers simultaneously. The doubling of physical layer rate of DCHSDPA UEs translates to user experience gain for real applications such as web browsing and video streaming in unloaded systems. In this paper, using a real prototype implementation, we focus on gains of DC-HSDPA over two carriers of Single Cell HSDPA (SC-HSDPA) in terms of number of additional supportable users. For a given user experience, we show how many more users DC-HSDPA can support compared to two carriers of SC-HSDPA.