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Antti Tölli and Petteri Hakalin
Nokia Networks, C/ Severo Ochoa, s/n Edif. de Inst. Universitarios, Pl. 3.,
Parque Tecnológico de Andalucía - 29590 Campanillas (Málaga) Spain
Abstract- The target of this paper is to quantify some of the of each cell, CRRM concept as a centralised network entity or
benefits of load information sharing for traffic management in an distributed in each controller is needed.
environment where several different radio access technologies co- Without information sharing only very little or no
exist with cells on several hierarchical layers. information about the target cell status can be obtained. So, a
The benefits of changing the load based handover thresholds
handover or call setup attempt can fail due to high load in the
depending on the load of the neighbouring inter-system/layer
cells are investigated by dynamic simulations for real-time target cell just not being known. In this case, the user
traffic. equipment (UE) either remains in its original cell or is
The results show that the number of unnecessary handover dropped/blocked.
attempts and failures can be significantly reduced by tuning the In order to achieve the trunking gain some of the UEs must
load based handover thresholds, and the load threshold tuning be triggered to make handovers or directed in call setup to
period should be between 10-30s in order to minimise other layers/frequencies/systems due to higher load in the
unnecessary handover measurements and signalling. current cell. However, continuous load balancing actions
I. INTRODUCTION among systems/carriers might lead to unnecessarily big
number of handovers between systems or carriers, and the
Future mobile networks will not consist of just one radio
capacity would potentially be reduced due to higher number of
access technology, such as WCDMA or GSM/EDGE but will required compressed mode (CM) measurements in WCDMA
contain several different radio access technologies, with cells cells.
on several hierarchical layers and frequencies (Fig. 1). In order
to utilise the existing resources most efficiently, the load based GSM/EDGE
GSM/EDGE
Macro
traffic management between different systems and cell layers WCDMA
WCDMA
becomes necessary and beneficial. GSM/EDGE
GSM/EDGE GSM/EDGE
GSM/EDGE
In the existing radio access networks the management of the
radio resources between the systems is performed in a
? WCDMA
WCDMA WCDMA
WCDMA
Micro
GSM/EDGE
GSM/EDGE
distributed way where radio network controllers of different multi-mode
terminal WLAN
WLAN WCDMA
WCDMA Pico
systems are managing the resources independently. Moreover, TDD
TDD
in this scheme the efficiency of the resource management
functions is limited by the area under control of the radio Fig. 1. Which resources should the multi-mode terminal
resource controllers (BSC, RNC etc.). This shortcoming is use?
especially important in the handover (HO) decision, where the Some trunking gain can be achieved already within one
information that can be taken into account to perform the system layer, relieving high load in congested cells by
handover is limited to the resources under the control of each directing users to neighbouring less loaded cells. However, the
radio resource controller. To get the best out of this mixture of load balancing actions considered in this paper are always
resources clearly some form of overall resource management inter-layer such as WCDMA inter-frequency or WCDMA–
is needed. Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM) GSM inter-RAT handovers.
has been introduced to perform these tasks. This solution will In this paper the benefits of changing the load based
act as an adviser for the access to the radio resources, one of handover thresholds depending on the load of the
its tasks being the prioritisation of the candidate target cells in neighbouring inter-system/frequency/layer cells are
handovers and call setups. The basic capacity (trunking) gains investigated by dynamic simulations for real-time (RT) traffic.
from CRRM concept were studied in [1]. The simulation assumptions for RT traffic apply to both
The uniform distribution of traffic is desirable to maximise conversational and streaming traffic classes.
the trunking gain in the network and to minimise the In the next section the idea behind the load based handover
probability of making needless traffic reason handovers. This threshold tuning is introduced. Section III describes the
also results in more uniform distribution of interference simulation model, algorithms and assumptions. In Section IV
between systems. Uniform traffic distribution is achieved from the simulation results for real-time data services are shown.
knowing the load status of each cell, i.e., information sharing Finally, the conclusions are drawn in Section V.
between network elements. In order to share the information
reason HO threshold
Inter-system traffic
to 100% is neither feasible due to the fact that the handover or
directed retry is not always ideal and there is always risk of 90
16
14
12 selection is based only on the cell load and no QoS issues are
10
8
6
considered. The source cell is also included in the target cell
4
2
selection, i.e., a load based handover attempt is failed if the
0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
triggering source cell is less loaded than any of the target cells.
km/h
Call Setup or
Fig. 4. UE speed distribution Handover
cell radius in [m]. The factor 3.6 in the denominator is a unit LOAD of target
conversion from [km/h] to [m/s]. The factor 2 is needed as an cell over the
LoadThreshold
No
No
adjustment, so that the border crossing probability is about
0.5, if UE moves one cell radius in one timestep. Yes
limits are used, such as maximum capacity for all cells in Fig. 5. Call setup and traffic reason HO procedure with and
kbits/s. Thus, if the limits are exceeded, the UE is either without CRRM [1]
handed over to another layer or the call is dropped.
In initial access (call setup) same load thresholds are used
For each single real-time call a certain duration time is
as in case of handovers. If the load of the source cell is over
chosen. The call duration distribution follows the exponential
the threshold, initial access HO is proceeded. In contrary case
distribution
initial access HO is failed and call is kept in original cell. If
1 −dx , the current cell is full, directed retry (DR) is performed to one
e f ( x) = (2)
d of the target cells/systems. See Fig. 5. If both current cell and
where the mean duration of a call is 120s (d=1/120). All target cell are fully loaded the call is blocked. Note that only
terminals are assumed to be multi-mode capable, so they can one DR is allowed in RT call setup.
operate in all systems/layers. The traffic model is a constant Performance comparison between simulations with and
bit rate model, with 100 % of activity, hence no silent periods without CRRM can be found in [1]. In this paper CRRM is
are modeled [2]. used in all simulation cases.
The call arrival process has been modelled with Poisson
distribution [2]. On average the number of active calls remain
constant during the simulation. Also with this approach it is
assumed that no queuing occurs.
Tuning period of
8
Blocking %
handovers are succeeded when triggered. With more feasible Tuning period of
2500
30s tuning period the reduction can be still over 10-fold with 30s
2000
higher system loads (blocking > 2%) as compared to the case 1500
Tuning period of
without tuning. HO failures consist of both triggered HO 60s
1000
attempts rejected by target cell and triggered HO attempts 500
No tuning
where the resulting target cell after cell prioritisation is the 0
same as the source cell. 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96
Total load [%]
350000
Tuning period of 1s
300000 Fig. 9. Number of HO threshold changes in tuning
250000 Tuning period of
simulations as a function of user traffic and tuning period.
HO failures
200000
10s
Following load based handover and handover failure rates
150000 Tuning period of
30s
are calculated by extracting the number of load reason inter-
100000 system/layer handovers and handover failures from Fig. 8 and
Tuning period of
50000 60s Fig. 7 at 2% blocking (87% total load, see Fig. 6), and divided
0 No tuning
by the number of users and the simulation time. Resulting
78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 94 96 rates are presented graphically in Fig. 10.
Total load [%]
4.00
0.09 3.00
unlike in case of DR.
The number of load reason initial access handovers is
2.00
0.08 higher with tuning due to the fact that the load thresholds are
1.00 maintained at higher level with higher network load. Again the
0.07 0.00 same saturation effect at 88-90% load can be clearly seen in
TP 1s TP 10s TP 30s TP 60s No tuning Fig. 12.
Fig. 10. Load reason handover and handover attempt rates V. CONCLUSIONS
per user per minute (2%blocking=87% total load) The number of unnecessary HO attempts can be
As all three factors (HO failures, load reason HOs, and HO significantly reduced by tuning the load based HO thresholds.
threshold changes) are considered, it seems that the tuning For example, the reduction can be 10-fold with high system
period thereabouts 10-30s results in the best system loads (blocking > 2%) with 30s tuning period.
performance. The auto-tuning period for load thresholds should be
In the following the number of Directed Retries (Fig. 11), between 10-30s in order to minimise unnecessary handover
the number of load reason initial access handovers (Fig. 12), measurements and signalling.
and the failure rates of load reason initial access handovers are The number of required directed retries can be reduced by
studied as a function of user traffic and tuning period (TP). load threshold tuning due to the fact that load based handovers
The load reason initial access handover failures behave very are allowed at higher network load levels.
similarly to load based HO failures depicted in Fig. 7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
6000
Tuning The authors would like to acknowledge the suggestions and
5000
period of 1s
the contributions from several colleagues within Nokia
Tuning
Networks.
Directed Retries
period of 1s
4000
Tuning
3500
period of 10s
3000
2500 Tuning
period of 30s
2000
1500 Tuning
period of 60s
1000
500 No tuning
0
75 80 85 90 95
Total load [%]