High-Speed Packet Access

High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is an amalgamation of two mobile , High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), that extends and improves the performance of existing 3G mobile telecommunication networks using the WCDMA protocols. A further improved 3GPP standard, Evolved High Speed Packet Access (also known as HSPA+), was released late in 2008 with subsequent worldwide adoption beginning in 2010. The newer standard allows bit-rates to reach as high as 337 Mbit/s in the downlink and 34 Mbit/s in the uplink. However, these speeds are rarely achieved in practice.

The first HSPA specifications supported increased peak data rates of up to 14 Mbit/s in the downlink and 5.76 Mbit/s in the uplink. It also reduced latency and provided up to five times more system capacity in the downlink and up to twice as much system capacity in the uplink compared with original WCDMA protocol.

High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhanced 3G (third-generation) mobile in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, also dubbed 3.5G, 3G+, or Turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data speeds and capacity. HSDPA has been introduced with 3GPP Release 5, which also accompanies an improvement on the uplink providing a new bearer of 384 kbit/s. The previous maximum bearer was 128 kbit/s. As well as improving data rates, HSDPA also decreases latency and so the round trip time for applications. HSPA+ introduced in 3GPP Release 7 further increases data rates by adding 64QAM modulation, MIMO and Dual-Cell HSDPA operation, i.e. two 5 MHz carriers are used simultaneously. Even higher speeds of up to 337.5 Mbit/s are possible with Release 11 of the 3GPP standards.

The first phase of HSDPA has been specified in the 3GPP release 5. Phase one introduces new basic functions and is aimed to achieve peak data rates of 14.0 Mbit/s with significantly reduced latency. The improvement in speed and latency reduces the cost per bit and enhances support for high-performance packet data applications. HSDPA is based on shared channel transmission and its key features are shared channel and multi-code transmission, higher-order modulation, short transmission time interval (TTI), fast link adaptation and scheduling along with fast hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). Further new features are the High Speed Downlink Shared Channels (HS-DSCH), the adaptive modulation QPSK and 16QAM and the High Speed Medium Access protocol (MAC-hs) in base station.

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