Digital Dividend: Potentials and Limitations of Mobile Broadband Access

Abstract:
This work highlights potentials and limitations of current and future mobile radio systems for area-wide mobile broadband access. The focus is on the current Release 8 of the UMTS LTE mobile radio standard implemented as single-antenna system. It is shown that, for the given parameters, user peak rates between 2.8Mbit/s at the cell edge and approx. 80Mbit/s near the base station can be achieved by single users utilizing 20MHz frequency bandwidth. The average cell goodput of an arbitrary number of uniformly distributed users in a radio cell reaches up to 39Mbit/s. These figures scale linearly with the available frequency bandwidth and can be increased using multiple-antenna systems and intelligent interference management algorithms. With the derived bounds it is shown that theoretical capacity achieving 4x4 multiple-antenna systems with ideal interference cancellation could achieve an average cell goodput > 1Gbit/s.