p to 5.76 Mbps for the transport of packet data traffic in the uplink to meet the requirements of the new data services and the vastly growing demand of user traffic in the 3G UMTS network. HSUPA improves UMTS uplink capabilities and performance in terms of higher data rates, reduced latency, and improved system capacity, and is therefore a natural complement to HSDPA. In HSDPA, the shared resources are the transmission power and the code space, both of which are managed in one central node, the Node B. However, in the uplink the shared resource is the amount of allowed uplink interference [DPSB07], which depends on the transmission powers of the individual UEs. Since the uplink power resources are distributed among the users and not located in one place, it is physically impossible to schedule multiple distributed UEs to share one transport channel, thus for each UE a new uplink transport channel called Enhanced Dedicated Channel (E-DCH) is used in HSUPA that supports the following key techniques: fast Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) with soft combining, fast Node B scheduling, soft handover (SHO) and also optionally a short 2ms uplink TTI. The HARQ is 2 UMTS Evolution used in HSUPA for the recovery of erroneous transmissions, which is the same as in HSDPA. Fast Node B scheduling is one of the fundamental technologies behind HSUPA, it is located at the Node B to control when and at what data rate a UE is allowed to transmit, thereby controlling the amount of interference affecting other users at the Node B and keeping the total interference below a maximum allowed level. Unlike in HSDPA where the scheduler and the transmission buffers are located in the same node, while in the uplink the scheduler is located in the Node B whereas the data buffers are distributed in the UEs. Hence in HSUPA, the UEs need to report the buffer status information to the scheduler at the Node B. Moreover, both soft and softer handover (the types of handover are introduced in section 3.3.4.2) are supported in HSUPA because receiving data from a term