Description:

Dual Cell-High Speed Downlink Packet Access (DC-HSDPA), which was introduced in Release 8 of the WCDMA specifications, enables the User Equipment (UE) to receive downlink data on two adjacent carriers simultaneously. In this paper, using a real prototype implementation, we focus on gains of DC-HSDPA over two carriers of Single Cell HSDPA (SC-HSDPA) in terms of number of additional supportable users. For a given user experience, we show how many more users DC-HSDPA can support compared to two carriers of SC-HSDPA; we show these results for the two applications, file download and web browsing. In addition, our results show the impact of the TCP Slow Start algorithm on the user experience gains of DC-HSDPA for the application of file download.