Laurent Noël’s research while affiliated with Nokia and other places

This chapter presents an overview of the universal mobile telecommunication services (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN) design challenges imposed by some 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) test cases, with a focus on radio-frequency (RF), talk-time improvements due to continuous packet connectivity (CPC), and also partly covering the impacts on baseband (BB). The chapter presents design challenges in the WCDMA transmitter chain. It covers the receive path, talk-time savings, and discusses the design of next-generation ‘world-wide’ phones which have to support multiple frequency bands as well as radio systems other than WCDMA. The future WCDMA device will provide competitive talk and stand-by time compared to GSM only devices, while HSPA Release 7 and 8 handsets will further improve the battery life time with discontinuous transmission and reception for voice and for data connections. baseband; multiaccess communication; radio frequency

As performance is a vital quality factor for systems, an important challenge during system development is to deal with performance requirements. For a credit card system, for example, a developer might consider performance requirements to “achieve good response time for sales authorization” and “achieve good space usage for storing customer information.” Being global in their nature and impact, performance requirements are an important class of non-functional requirements (NFRs). To be effective, systems should attain NFRs as well as functional requirements (e.g., requiring a credit card system to authorize sales). However, it is generally difficult to deal with performance requirements and other NFRs, as they can conflict and interact with each other and with the many implementation alternatives which have varying features and tradeoffs.

Introduction Transmitter Chain System Design Challenges Receiver Chain Design Challenges Multi-Mode/Band Challenges Conclusions References