Abstract
We investigate the physical layer performance of HSDPA via GEO satellites for use in S-UMTS and SDMB. The impact of large round trip delay on link adaptation is discussed and link-level results are presented on the performance of HARQ for a variable number of retransmissions and different categories of UE in a rich multipath urban environment with three IMRs. It is shown that the N-channel SAW HARQ protocol can significantly increase the average throughput particularly for 16-QAM but the large round trip delay also requires an increase in the number of parallel HARQ channels resulting in high memory requirements at the UE. Receive antenna diversity with varying degrees of antenna correlation is also investigated as a possible performance enhancing method. The results presented here will help in specifying the physical layer of satellite HSDPA. Copyright © 2006 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.