Improving HSDPA Indoor Coverage and Throughput by Repeater and Dedicated Indoor System

The target of the paper is to provide guidelines for indoor planning and optimization using an outdoor-to-indoor repeater or a dedicated indoor system. The paper provides practical information for enhancing the performance of high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) in an indoor environment. The capabilities of an outdoor-to-indoor analog WCDMA repeater are set against a dedicated indoor system and, furthermore, compared to indoor coverage of a nearby macrocellular base station. An extensive measurement campaign with varying system configurations was arranged in different indoor environments. The results show that compared to dedicated indoor systems, similar HSDPA performance can be provided by extending macrocellular coverage inside buildings using an outdoor-to-indoor repeater. According to the measurements, the pilot coverage planning threshold of about −80 dBm ensures a 2500 kbps throughput for shared HSDPA connections. Improving the coverage above −80 dBm seems to provide only small advantage in HSDPA throughput. Of course, the pilot planning thresholds may change if different channel power allocations are used. In addition, network performance can be further improved by increasing the antenna density in the serving distributed antenna system. Finally, good performance of repeater implementation needs careful repeater gain setting and donor antenna siting.