The explosive growth of
mobile communications, and the overly crowded and expensive spectrum have
pushed both system engineers and operators to make their systems as spectrally efficient
as possible in order to accommodate the increasing traffic demand. This article
is a tutorial introduction to the orthogonal subchannel (OSC) technique. OSC
was adopted to improve the capacity of the GSM/EDGE radio access network GERAN,
and it is a new concept in which two users can simultaneously share the same
GSM radio resource (time slot and frequency) in both the downlink and in uplink
directions. Potentially, OSC could not only provide increased network capacity,
but also reduce network-associated costs through more efficient usage of
hardware and spectrum resources. In addition, this article presents some
challenges related to this method, as well as solutions and their respective
impact.
The results provided herein
may contribute to guidelines for network dimensioning and optimization, as well
as list potential enhancements to the OSC radio resource management mechanisms
needed to further exploit the benefits of OSC. Currently, in real OSC network
deployments a capacity gain of 50 percent has been achieved at the cell level. As
an indication of the importance of OSC, GSMA awarded it (called Quad Rate) the
Best Technology Breakthrough award at Mobile World Congress 2012.
