5A.5 Beacon characteristics of physical channels

25.2213GPPPhysical channels and mapping of transport channels onto physical channels (TDD)Release 17TS

For the purpose of measurements, common physical channels that are allocated to particular locations (time slot, code) shall have particular physical characteristics, called beacon characteristics. Physical channels with beacon characteristics are called beacon channels. The location of the beacon channels is called beacon location. The beacon channels shall provide the beacon function, i.e. a reference power level at the beacon location, regularly existing in each subframe. Thus, beacon channels must be present in each subframe.

5A.5.1 Location of beacon channels

The beacon location is described as follows:

The beacon function shall be provided by the physical channels that are allocated to channelisation code and in Timeslot#0.

Note that by this definition the P-CCPCH always has beacon characteristics. In a multi-frequency cell beacon channels are always transmitted on the primary frequency.

5A.5.2 Physical characteristics of the beacon function

The beacon channels shall have the following physical characteristics.

They:

– are transmitted with reference power;

– are transmitted without beamforming;

– use midamble m⁽¹⁾ and m⁽²⁾ exclusively in this time slot

The reference power corresponds to the sum of the power allocated to both midambles m⁽¹⁾ and m⁽²⁾. Two possibilities exist:

– If SCTD antenna diversity is not applied to beacon channels, all the reference power of any beacon channel is allocated to m⁽¹⁾.

– If SCTD antenna diversity is applied to beacon channels, for any beacon channel midambles m⁽¹⁾ and m⁽²⁾ are each allocated half of the reference power.