2

UMTS System and Air Interface

Architecture
A major differentiation of 3G systems over the 2G cellular networks is the provision of
multiple data-rate services with varying quality requirements and a higher spectrally
efficient and flexible radio interface. The benefit of a higher spectrally efficient and flexible
air interface particularly pertains to UMTS, which has adopted the WCDMA for its air
interface. The WCDMA, as one air interface specification for the 3G systems under the
ITU umbrella of the IMT-2000 (International Mobile Telephony 2000) systems, has been
or is being used widely in Europe, many parts of Asia including Japan and Korea, and even
in North America recently. In North America, because the original spectrum specified for
the IMT-2000 at around 2 GHz had originally been assigned to 2G systems (PCS band at
around 1900 MHz), 3G systems using the WCDMA air interface are implemented through
the re-farming of portions of the spectrum allocated to 2G systems. A second alternative
for countries where the global IMT-2000 spectrum has not been available is the use of the
CDMA-2000 air interface. This is a multi-carrier evolution of the CDMA based 2G
systems, IS-95, which is implemented over 1.25 MHz bands. However, the WCDMA air
interface allows the use of 5 MHz wide channels compared to the 1.25 MHz-wide channels
used in the CDMA 2000 version of the 3G air interface specifications. This results in many
benefits, which include higher trunking efficiency over the radio band, higher multipath
diversity gains that improve the coverage, and more flexible and efficient higher data rate
implementations. This chapter introduces the architecture and the specific mechanisms of
the WCDMA air interface used to implement efficiently multiple data-rate services and
utilize the radio capacity. A brief discussion is given of the overall UMTS network
architecture and the core network elements definitions and functions. This introduction is
expected to provide the reader with the necessary background for what follows in the rest
of the book: the in-depth coverage and study of the important WCDMA mechanisms,
functions, and procedures for the planning and optimization of UMTS networks. We begin
with a brief discussion of the overall UMTS network architecture, elements, and
terminologies as related to the radio access and the core network.

UMTS Network Planning, Optimization, and Inter-Operation with GSM Moe Rahnema
2008 John Wiley & Sons, (Asia) Pte Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-470-82301-9