Abstract of HSPA – High Speed Packet Access

The High Speed Packet Access technology is the most widely used mobile broadband technology in communication world. It was already built in more than 3.8 billion connection with GSM family of technologies. The HSPA technology is referred to both High Speed Downlink Packet Access (3GPP Release 5) and to High Speed Uplink Packet Access (3GPP Release 6). The Evolved HSPA technology or HSPA + is the evolution of HSPA that extends operator’s investments before the next generation’s technology 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE or 3GPP Release 8). The HSPA technology is implemented on third generaton (3G) UMTS/WCDMA network and accepted as the leader in mobile data communication.

Using the HSDPA optimization on downlink is performed, whereas the HSUPA technology applying Enhanced Dedicated Channel (E-DCH) sets some improvements for the uplink performance optimization. The products that support HSUPA became available in 2007 and the combination of both HSDPA and HSUPA were called HSPA. Adopting these technologies the throughput, latency and spectral efficiency were improved. Introducing HSPA resulted to the increase of overall throughput approximately to 85 % on the uplink and a rise more than 50 % in user throughput.

The HSPA downlink available rates are 1 to 4 Mbps and for the uplink are 500 kbps to 2Mbps as of 1 quarter of 2009. The theoretical bit rates are 14Mbps at the downlink and 5.8 Mbps at the uplink in a 5MHz channel. Besides, the latency is notably reduced as well. In the improved network, the latency is less than 50ms, and after the introduction of 2ms Transmission Time Interval (TTI) latency is expected to be just 30ms.

HSPA offers an effective wireless broadband technology that can be evolved to HSPA+ to meet the increasing customer demands. HSPA+ implements many of the techniques offered by LTE.

Deployment of HSPA
As reported by independent analyst firm Informa Telecoms & Media almost 94 % of UMTS/WCDMA operators and 82.8 million customers globally employing HSPA by the end of 2008, and it is expected that the number of customers will increase to 800 million by 2013

There are more than 265 operators with HSDPA of which 77 have been upgraded to HSPA; in Latin America, there are 47 HSDPA networks in 23 countries (May 2009). It is forecasted that all WCDMA operators will upgrade their network to HSPA

The main idea of HSDPA concept is a growth of packet access throughput with methods known from Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM)/ Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) standards, involving link adaptation and fast physical layers (L1) retransmission combining. The demand of arriving to possible memory requirements and bringing control for link adaptation closer to the air interface brought forward the High Speed Downlink Shared Channel