What is 3G TD-SCDMA

TD-SCDMA was a variant of UMTS WCDMA that was developed in China and used TDD techniques to provide some key advantages.

3G UMTS includes:
What is UMTS Network architecture Radio access Radio interface Frequency bands UMTS CDMA Modulation Data channels UMTS TDD TD-SDCDMA Handover

TD-SCDMA is a time division duplex, TDD version of UMTS that was developed in China and offered some key advantages as a TDD version. TD-SCDMA standards for Time Division - Synchronous CDMA.

Although different to the more standard TDD version of UMTS, TD-SCDMA was adopted by 3GPP and was included in the 3GPP standards as an accepted version of UMTS.

Much of the work to develop TD-SCDMA was undertaken by China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT).

TD-SCDMA offers the advantages of the of any TDD system, but also was designed to incorporate many new technologies including joint detection, adaptive antennas, and dynamic channel allocation.

Although TD-SCDMA was never deployed outside China, it promoted the advantages of TDD systems and enabled 4G LTE push forwards the TDD versions of 4G LTE.

TD-SCDMA basics

One of the key elements of TD-SCDMA is the fact that it uses a TDD, Time Division Duplex approach. As seen with UMTS TDD this has advantages in a number of areas, enabling the balance to be changed between uplink and downlink to accommodate the different levels of data transfer. It also has advantages in terms of using unpaired spectrum, spectrum efficiency for certain loads and it does not require expensive diplexers in the handsets to enable simultaneous transmission on the uplink and downlink, although transmit / receive switching times must be accommodated and can reduce the efficiency of the system.

As a further advantage, TD-SCDMA uses the same RAN as that used for UMTS. In this way it is possible to run TD-SCDMA alongside UMTS, and thereby simplifying multi-system designs.

Although UMTS (W-CDMA) and cdma2000 are widely recognized as 3G cellular standards, TD-SCDMA is equally valid. In fact it has been adopted as the low chip rate (LCR) version of the 3GPP TDD standard.

TD-SDCMA specification overview

The TD-SCDMA standard provides many advantages. As already mentioned it has many similarities to W-CDMA, although a summary of the basic features and specification is given below:

TD-SCDMA Specification Summary
TD-SCDMA Characteristic	Figure
Bandwidth	1.6 MHz
Chip rate per carrier	1.28 Mcps
Frame Rate	10ms
Spectrum spreading mode	DS SF=1/2/4/8/16
Modulation	QPSK / 8PSK / 16QAM
Channel coding	Convolutional codes: R=1/2,1/3 Turbo implemented
Interleaving	10/20/40/80 ms
Frame structure	Super frame 720ms,Radio frame 10ms Subframe 5 ms
Uplink synchronisation	1/2 chip
Number of voice channels per carrier	48
Spectrum Efficiency	25Erl./MHz
Total transmission rate provided by each carrier	1.971Mbps

TD-SCDMA operation

The UMTS TD-SCDMA system has adopted a number of advanced techniques and technologies to optimise the operation. These are often above and beyond those that have been catered for in the more widely used standard forms of FDD and TDD UMTS. Some of these result from the fact that TD-SCDMA uses the same frequency for both uplink and downlink, and as a result of the higher processing levels now available.

These include:

Smart antennas: Smart antenna technology is incorporated into the base station. This enables beams to be formed and this is able to reduce interference between terminals and concentrate transmitted power at active terminals. This technique is implemented using smart antenna arrays that incorporate advanced DSP algorithms. The base station is able to locate the mobile terminals and to steer transmit beams to specific terminals. In this way spatial beamforming is able to reduce interference within a given channel with a resulting improvement in the downlink capacity.
Joint detection technology: Within CDMA, multiple users all occupy the same frequency band, accessing he base station using different codes. In this way, multiple-access interference results and this is a major problem in CDMA-based systems. A technique referred to as joint detection technology treats signals from all users as useful and processes them in parallel. As the maximum number of users in any time slot is 16, the processing complexity to separate users is kept within manageable limits.
User terminals and base station synchronisation: The synchronisation of the network enables precise adjustment of the timing advances for transmission from terminals so that signals from different users arrive at the base station together, and not overlapping in time into the transmit time frames making detection much simpler. This synchronisation enables faster search for neighbouring cells during handover and it also removes the need for soft handover.

TD-SCDMA was deployed in China, but received little interest elsewhere. However it did help promote the cause for TDD systems and enabled the 4G LTS TDD schemes to receive a much higher profile.