Coverage Performance of Common/Shared Control Signals Using Transmit Diversity in Evolved UTRA Downlink

Abstract

This paper presents the best transmit diversity schemes for three types of common/shared control signals from the viewpoint of the block error rate (BLER) performance in the Evolved UTRA downlink employing OFDM radio access. This paper also presents the coverage performance of the common/shared control signals using transmit diversity with respect to the outage probability that satisfies the required BLER performance, which is a major factor determining the cell configuration. Simulation results clarify that Space-Frequency Block Code (SFBC) and the combination of SFBC and Frequency Switched Transmit Diversity (FSTD) are the best transmit diversity schemes among the open-loop type transmit diversity candidates for two-antenna and four-antenna transmission cases, respectively. Furthermore, we show through system-level simulations that SFBC is very effective in reducing the outage probability at the required BLER for the physical broadcast channel (PBCH), for the common control signal with resource block (RB)-level assignment such as the dynamic broadcast channel (D-BCH) and paging channel (PCH), and in increasing the number of accommodated L1/L2 control signals over one transmission time interval duration, using mini-control channel element (CCE)-level assignment.