Resource reduction method for the LTE-advanced uplink ACK/NACK signal and SR

Abstract

Advanced Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (Advanced E-UTRA), called LTE-Advanced, has been standardized in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a candidate for IMT-Advanced. LTE-Advanced supports spatial orthogonal-resource transmit diversity (SORTD) [1], [2] for ACK/NACK signals and scheduling requests (SRs), which are used to control downlink hybrid automatic repeat requests (HARQs) and manage uplink radio resources based on uplink data traffic, respectively. Both ACK/NACK signals and SRs are carried via a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH) [3], and a common PUCCH format is used for both ACK/NACK signals and SRs. If SORTD is used, the base station assigns mutually orthogonal resources to each antenna included in the user equipment (UE) for ACK/NACK signals and SRs; hence, the number of required resources increases with the number of transmitting antennas in the UE. In this paper, we study the resource reduction method for ACK/NACK signal and SR in case of SORTD using the concept of common resource. In addition, we investigate a phase rotation scheme for common resources to improve the SR detection performance.