Spatial and Temporal Fairness in Heterogeneous HSDPA-Enabled UMTS Networks

The system performance of an integrated UMTS network with both High-Speed Down-link Packet Access users and Release '99 QoS users depends on many factors like user location, number of users, interference, multi-path propagation profile, and radio resource sharing schemes. Additionally, the user behavior is an important factor; users of Internet best-effort applications tend to follow a volume-based behavior, meaning they stay in the system until the requested data is completely transmitted. In conjunction with the opportunistic transmission scheme implemented in HSDPA, this has implications to the spatial distribution of active users as well as to the time-average user and cell throughput.