A QUANTIFICATION OF LINK AVERAGE THROUGHPUT PERFORMANCE IN HSDPA AND HSUPA BY FIELD MEASUREMENT

In recent years, the usage of real time and multimedia applications is fast increasing globally by demanding higher capacity and lower latency. In order to fulfil such requirements, 3GPP steps in by introducing the HSDPA and HSUPA in Release 5 and 6 respectively. This paper aim to quantify the average user data throughput performance in High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) based on field measurement at the cell cluster level, in typical builtup terrain. Specifically, the intention is to evaluate and quantify the average network throughput and bandwidth efficiency, among others in the study location. We decided to examine the maximum average throughput performance of the network and to see how well it correlates with advertised performance values. We found out that, as expected, HSDPA offers a clearly higher throughput and lower delay compared to HSUPA. The measured maximum average throughput values were well far below the advertised performance values in HSDPA and HSUPA. The maximum measured maximum average throughputs in Kbps at the different cell clusters are 343, 420, 336, 374, 351 for HSDPA and 446, 472, 594, 328, 441 for HSUPA respectively.