WCDMA+

Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

February 15, 2013

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

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Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

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2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

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WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

1 Introduction
A virtuous cycle of user-friendly smartphones & tablets, and improving data rates has led to increasing
adoption of data intensive mobile apps and services. This has resulted in an explosion of data traffic
which has lead to increasing congestion on HSPA+ mobile networks. Qualcomm has been developing
innovative technologies to help network operators address their network capacity needs by means of
enhanced network topologies, spectrum aggregation techniques, load balancing techniques and efficiency
improvements. This paper describes WCDMA+, a UMTS feature set that significantly improves the
efficiency of Release 99 (R99) Circuit Switched (CS) voice calls.
In UMTS, voice and data users compete for the same radio resources. As the trend of increasing mobile
data traffic is expected to continue well into the future, WCDMA+ can help free up radio network
capacity for HSPA+ data services that users increasingly desire.
Another consequence of the popularity of these devices is that their large displays, always on applications
and high speed modems consume substantial amounts of power resulting in shorter battery life. Aesthetic
requirements limit the amount of space available for larger batteries. Any reduction in power
consumption for voice calls would help extend battery life, and WCDMA+ addresses this need by
reducing modem power consumption and increasing talk time.

2 WCDMA+ Features
In recent years, most of the attention in UMTS has focused on improvement to data services through
features such as HSDPA, HSUPA, MC-HSPA+, MultiFlow etc., while CS Voice call standards have
remained more or less the same since the early days of WCDMA in Release 99. To address this,
Qualcomm has proposed WCDMA+ as part of 3GPP Release 12. This section illustrates the feature set
that comprises WCDMA+.

2.1 Transmit power overhead reduction

When designing UMTS R99 CS voice, provision was made for a dedicated pilot in the downlink (DL),
which consumes 24% of the DL power budget as shown in Figure 1. The dedicated pilot supports channel
estimation at the UE and enables other features like downlink transmit-diversity which did not find major
commercial adoption. WCDMA+ improves
this design by eliminating the dedicated
pilot, and using the Transmit Power Control
(TPC) bits for channel estimation. This
releases the power budget originally
allocated to dedicated pilot for re-use by
voice and data channels. The impact on the
UE modem design is expected to be small.
Figure 1: Today's R99 Downlink Power distribution

2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

2.2 New frame format

The current CS voice service in UMTS uses a 20ms frame structure to carry voice frames. This section
describes the new frame format that is proposed to make the voice frame transmission more efficient.
This new design decreases the transmitter and receiver ON-time, and significantly reduces modem current
consumption

2.2.1 Downlink frame format

On the downlink, WCDMA+ introduces a new frame format that multiplexes two voice calls by splitting
the 20ms frame into two 10ms halves. As can be seen in Figure 2, the 20ms Transmission Time Interval
(TTI) is split into two 10ms TTIs. Voice traffic from two UEs is multiplexed into the same channel, each
occupying alternating 10ms TTIs. The only exception to this is the Transmit Power Control (TPC) bits
that are carried even during the TTI that is allocated to the other UE (grayed out blocks).

Figure 2: Downlink WCDMA+ frame format

This scheme allows for the Node B transmitter to complete sending the frame in 10ms and DTX for the
remaining 10ms. The DPCCH also carries the Ack for UL frames received successfully.

2.2.2 UL frame format

On the uplink (UL), the 20ms TTI is split into two 10ms halves. The UE tries to achieve a 95%
transmission success rate in the first 10ms. Should it however fail to do so, the packet is repeated over the
next 10ms.

Figure 3: UL WCDMA+ frame & control channel format

2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

Figure 3 illustrates the new frame structure and the new Ack/Control channel. The new channel carries
Transport Format Combination Indicator (TFCI) bits to help early decoding for Frame Early Termination
as described in the following section.

2.3 Frame Early Termination (FET)

As the UE and NodeB experiences dynamic radio conditions, in many cases, they can successfully decode
voice frames much earlier than the currently allotted 20ms TTI. This is also facilitated by the error
correction ability of the redundancy bits included in the voice frame during the encoding process.
However, there is currently no mechanism to take advantage of this phenomenon.
WCDMA+ proposes to improve this by enabling the receiver to periodically decode partially received
voice frames and sending an acknowledgement upon successful decode. This allows the sender to
terminate the transmission early, leading to savings of radio resources, reduced interference and reduced
modem power consumption. The new frame format introduced in Sec 2.2 further enhances FET by
allowing earlier decoding due to the shorter TTIs.

2.3.1 Downlink FET

Figure 4 illustrates Frame Early Termination in the downlink. As described, the UE stops receiving voice
frames after successful decode. A new uplink Ack/control physical channel is introduced to allow the UE
to provide feedback to the NodeB of decode success.

Figure 4: Downlink FET timeline

Figure 5 presents simulation
results for early decode success
rate for FET in the downlink.
These indicate that in as early as
6ms almost 70% of the voice
frames are decoded successfully
under most channel models.

Figure 5: DL FET early decode success rate

2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

2.3.2 Uplink FET

As shown in Figure 6, for FET on the uplink, the ACK for successful decode is carried on the DL control
channel and is multiplexed with the DL transmit power control symbols. Once the NodeB successfully
decodes a voice frame it acknowledges this to the UE.

Figure 6: UL FET timeline

When the UE and the Node B have successfully decoded the voice frames, the UE can turn off its receiver
and transmitter and the NodeB
can stop transmitting to the UE.
Figure 7 illustrates results of
simulations with the FET
mechanism. As observed, UL
FET coupled with the new frame
format enables successful voice
frame decoding with greater than
80% probability as early as 8ms
under most channel models.
However, should the NodeB fail
to decode the frame within the
first 10ms, the UE will retransmit
it in the following 10ms.
Figure 7: FET Early decode success rates (UL)

2.4 EVS voice codec

Another major contributor to the network capacity improvement benefit of WCDMA+ is the high quality
and more efficient Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) codec that is currently under standardization in 3GPP.
Codecs
AMR
AMR-WB
EVS SC-VBR

Avg. Bit Rate

12.2 kbps
12.65 kbps
5.9 kbps

Bandwidth
Narrowband (0-4 KHz)
Wideband (0-8 KHz)
Wideband (0-8 KHz)

Quality
Todays user experience
Better than AMR at 12.2 kbps
Target: equivalent to AMR-WB 12.65k
and much better than AMR 12.2 k
Table 1: EVS codec comparison
2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

As shown in Table 1, the Source Controlled-Variable Bit Rate (SC-VBR) variant of the EVS codec
family operates at an average of 5.9kbps. Even at about the average data rate of the currently used
AMR12.2 codec, the EVS SC-VBR codec is able to provide richer and improved voice quality due to its
wideband capability.

3 WCDMA+ Performance Benefits

As part of its research, Qualcomm has performed link and system simulations to analyze the gains that
can be realized from WCDMA+. Figure 8 illustrates the system benefits resulting from the techniques
proposed as part of WCDMA+. In todays UMTS systems, a 5MHz carrier can either support 48 R99 CS
voice calls using the AMR12.2 codec or carry 5.6Mbps of DL data (Rel 7) in data-only mode, or some
combination in between. With WCDMA+, the same 48 CS voice calls will now consume a fraction of the
capacity, and the resulting freed up radio resources can now be used to carry about 3.5 Mbps in HSDPA,
which is equivalent to about 62% of the
data capacity of a 5MHz UMTS dataonly carrier. Similar improvement in data
capacity (77%) is realizable on the
uplink (HSUPA) as well.
In addition to the system capacity gains,
WCDMA+ results in around 20% - 25%
reduction in modem power consumption
during CS voice calls leading to a direct
improvement in UE talk times.
Figure 8: WCDMA+ network data capacity improvement

3.1 Components of WCDMA+ gains

As described in the previous sections, WCDMA+ achieves its gains through physical layer and voice
codec improvements. As can be seen in Figure 9, the physical layer enhancements, including the new
frame format and Frame Early Termination, frees up about 37% of the radio resources for HSDPA. The
EVS codec improves this further by
freeing up an additional 25% of
resources for data in the downlink.
It is however important to note that
benefits from the physical layer
enhancements and EVS voice codec
are not dependent on each other and
can be realized separately. That
said, the variable bit rate nature of
the EVS codec lends itself more
naturally to enhancing the
improvements in the presence of
FET.
Figure 9: WCDMA+ gain components
2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

WCDMA+ Voice and HSPA+ data capacity improvements

3.2 WCDMA+ benefits across operating points

The gains modeled in the previous section simulated the system capacity at a load of almost 100% which
translates to 48 voice calls per cell. Simulation results in Figure 10 show that during heavy load, system
can deliver more than 6x times better data
rates with WCDMA+ as compared to an
R99 system.
Most mobile networks operate at lower
loads. For example, even at peak voice
hours, call loads may be closer to 25-30
calls per cell. However, as shown in Figure
10, even at these reduced operating points,
data capacity improvements are quite
substantial.
Similar cell throughput and user
experience gains are observable on the
uplink as well.
Figure 10: WCDMA+ benefits across network loads

4 Conclusion
As users increasingly adopt more advanced mobile devices and data intensive applications, network
operators are looking for mechanisms to address this data capacity challenge. Improvements proposed
under the WCDMA+ feature set as part of 3GPP Release 12 can provide substantial voice and data
capacity improvements to mobile data networks. Benefits include:

Improvement to circuit switched (CS) voice efficiency

Frees up significant radio network resources (62% on DL and 77% on UL) for mobile data, while
maintaining voice capacity

Achieves 20%-25% reduction in modem current consumption resulting in UE talk time

improvements

As mobile networks move to LTE for data services and subsequently to Voice over LTE (VoLTE), both,
LTE and HSPA+ networks are likely to co-exist for the foreseeable future. In this multi-mode world,
Circuit Switched Fall Back (CSFB) to WCDMA / WCDMA+ will continue to be a primary voice service
bearer. Hence, WCDMA+ techniques will continue to be applicable for a significant number of years to
come.

2013 Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.