Radio resource allocation for data services in UMTS networks

The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) has to support various services and applications with diverse bit rate and quality of service (QoS) requirements. This paper proposes two bandwidth efficient resource allocation policies that are applicable for data services in the downlink of a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) network. These resource allocation strategies take the interference and radio channel conditions of the different users into account to optimize the total downlink system capacity. It is shown that this provides a significant improvement compared to the conventional approach where each user receives the same bit rate irrespectively of its radio channel conditions. This is particularly important, because the downlink is the bottleneck of a W-CDMA system due to the asymmetric traffic characteristics of data services.