Abstract

Work on WCDMA as a concept for 3rd generation mobile communication (IMT-2000) started almost a decade ago in research projects sponsored by the European Community. The work continued with standardization activities of WCDMA in a number of standardization bodies, i.e., ETSI, ARIB, TTA and in T1P1. This year the standardization work has been transferred into one joint standardization project, 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) with members from all these standardization bodies. During the last year manufacturers and operators have also together succeeded in harmonizing all proposed cdma-based 3rd generation concepts into one standard with three different modes. The Direct-Sequence mode is based on WCDMA specified by 3GPP (UTRA/FDD), the Multi-Carrier mode is based on cdma2000 Multi-Carrier specified by 3GPP2, and the TDD mode is based on the TDD mode specified by 3GPP (UTRA TDD). In the paper we give a brief description of the WCDMA radio interface.