Fast performance prediction of power controlled HSUPA with channel estimation

Transmit power control (TPC) is used in high speed uplink packet access (HSUPA) to compensate for the near far effect which degrades system performance. However, its use in joint application with turbo coding, and hybrid automatic repeat request (Hybrid-ARQ) is very prohibitive and time consuming. In this article, we propose a simplified simulation methodology for power controlled HSUPA with Hybrid-ARQ Chase combining considering the effect of channel estimation on the system performance. The proposed method was tested on Rake and chip-level linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) receivers. Simulation results show that the CPU time taken to reach the required performance is significantly reduced. Moreover, when the channel estimation is taken into account with an important number of pilot symbols, the system performance is close to that obtained with perfect channel acknowledgement (PCA).