WCDMA uplink parallel interference cancellation: system simulations and prototype field trials

Interference cancellation (IC) is one identified key technology to enhance WCDMA uplink performance. The goal of this contribution is to highlight the relative uplink system capacity improvement available for WCDMA, especially in realistic typical urban radio environments when employing receiver implementations including realistic channel estimation, searcher, and so forth. The performance of the selected limited-complexity parallel IC receiver is first evaluated with link-level simulations in order to provide input to system-level simulations. The system-level methodology is explained and a 40% system-level uplink capacity increase compared to utilizing the conventional RAKE receiver is found. The limited-complexity parallel IC receiver is then evaluated in a single-cell field trial. The trials show that both the mean and the variance of the outer-loop power control is reduced, which implies an overall increased capacity and an increased battery life of the terminals. Furthermore, the observed capacity gains are in accordance with system simulations.