AbstractThis paper discusses the use of Carrier Ethernet for

the transport of UMTS radio access network as a alternative

solution for the gradual migration towards pure IP-based RAN.
By means of Pseudo-Wire technique, the ATM service is
emulated over the underlying Ethernet network. Within this
work, the performance of such Carrier Ethernet based UTRAN
is evaluated and compared to the ATM-based UTRAN of UMTS
Release 99, in particular the transport efficiency, the delay and
packet losses of the Iub. Another contribution of this paper is to
investigate the parameter settings to provide a guideline for the
optimum configurations.
Keywords-Carrier Ethernet, UTRAN, Iub, Pseudo-Wire, PWE3
I. INTRODUCTION
Third generation (3G) mobile communication systems, in
particular the Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems
(UMTS), are expected to have an intensive growth in the next
few years caused by a continuously increasing number of
mobile subscribers and operative networks all over the world,
as well as by a dramatically growing traffic demand for data
applications like video streaming, web and multimedia
services. This in turn requires the Universal Terrestrial Radio
Access Network (UTRAN) to offer much higher transport
capacity supporting the evolved UMTS radio interface and
HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) as well as
HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) services [1][2].
But adding ATM capacity by leasing additional E1/T1 lines
leads to a linear increase of the operation expense. Therefore,
the usage of cost efficient IP as an alternative transport
technology is becoming a trend of UTRAN evolution. IP also
facilitates the integration of different radio access technologies
operating over a common IP backbone and therefore eases the
development of heterogeneous network access. However,
substantial expenditures have been invested ATM-based
transport networks with numerous NodeBs with ATM-based
interfaces. Thus a smooth introduction of IP asks for a gradual
evolution towards IP. Therefore, an intermediate migration
solution is needed to integrate cost-efficient IP based transport
alternatives to reduce the cost per bit-rate within the radio
access network, and to allow backward compatibility and
interworking of RANs with different transport technologies.
In this context, Carrier Ethernet [3] has already established
itself as a very cost-effective way of addressing the rapidly
increasing bandwidth demands of new services. It is also a
viable solution of converged fixed-mobile access networks, as
well as a flexible and reliable way for enabling heterogeneous
access networks and "all IP" 3G mobile networks.
The deployment of Carrier Ethernet for UTRAN is realized
by establishing Pseudo-Wires in the backhaul network. This
technique is standardized by the IETFs Pseudo Wire
Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3) working group defining
various types of Pseudo-Wires to emulate traditional and
emerging services such as ATM or frame relay over Packet
Switched Network (PSN) [4][5][6]. Despite many technical
advantages and low costs of implementing Carrier Ethernet as
transport in the UTRAN, there are two major performance
challenges that need further investigation [3]: (1) The delay is
often an issue of paramount importance in UTRAN networks,
not only due to its impact on service quality, but also because
some signaling and control protocols cannot tolerate additional
delay. The transport network must deliver the frame on time to
the base stations for transmission over the air, excessively
delayed frames are discarded [8]. This leads to strict delay and
delay variation requirements on the UTRAN transport
network. (2) The QoS challenge in Ethernet networks is
mainly associated with the fact that Ethernet was designed as a
connectionless technology. Therefore, predefining a path for a
service, and pre-allocating bandwidth along this path is
considered impossible. Standard QoS mechanisms are possible
to prioritize between packets belonging to different traffic
classes, but this cannot really guarantee an end-to-end QoS.
Recently, many proposals have been made by mobile
operators to use Carrier Ethernet as the transport network in
UTRAN by means of establishing an Ethernet Pseudo-Wire.
However, to the best of authors knowledge, there have not
been many investigations and analyses on the performance of
the Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN, especially regarding its
transmission efficiency, delay QoS and requirement of the
transport network bandwidth compared to the ATM-based
UTRAN of UMTS Rel99. In the present work we study the
performance of Carrier Ethernet-based transport in UTRAN,
in particular the experienced transport delay, jitter and packet
loss, and achievable bandwidth efficiency on the Iub interface
(between RNC and NodeB) of single Pseudo-Wire scenario.
Xi Li
1
, Yongzi Zeng
1
, Bjoern Kracker
2
, Richard Schelb
2
, Carmelita Goerg
1
, Andreas Timm-Giel
1
1
Communication Networks, University of Bremen, Germany
email: [xili | yzeng | cg| atg]@comnets.uni-bremen.de
2
Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
email: [bjoern.kracker | richard.schelb]@nsn.com
Carrier Ethernet for Transport in UMTS Radio
Access Network: Ethernet Backhaul Evolution
978-1-4244-1645-5/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE 2537
The analysis is carried out from simulations under a high-
loaded mixed voice and data traffic scenario, and compared to
the ATM-based UTRAN of UMTS R99. Usually the network
operators can tune a number of parameters in Pseudo-Wire to
control the end-to-end delay and jitter. In this paper, the
impact of different parameter settings is also investigated and
hence the optimum PWE configuration is determined.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section
II introduces the Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN structure and
protocol stacks. Section III addresses the major performance
metrics and QoS criteria. Section IV describes the applied
traffic model and simulated network scenario. Section V
presents the simulation results and the performance analysis.
The end conclusions the paper and discusses the future work.
II. CARRIER ETHERNET-BASED UTRANNETWORK
A. Network Structure and Protocol Stack
According to the PWE3 reference model in IETF draft [5],
the network structure of UTRAN is reorganized to deploy the
Pseudo-Wire replacing the conventional ATM transport
network layer (TNL) with an Ethernet network, as illustrated
in Figure 1. Both the NodeB and RNC are Customer Edges
(CEs), which are not aware of using an emulated ATM service
over Ethernet. The NodeB and RNC are connected to the
transport Ethernet network via two intermediate PWE capable
routers (ATM_IP_router) which contain dual interfaces for
ATM and Ethernet. Such routers are located at the edge of the
ATM network and the Ethernet network, hence also called as
Provider Edges (PEs), which establish a tunnel emulating
ATM service over the Ethernet network for the corresponding
CEs. Between these routers, an Ethernet Pseudo-Wire is
established. ATM cells coming from CEs will be encapsulated
into Ethernet PDUs within the routers and then carried across
the underlying Ethernet network. After the Ethernet packets
arrive at the egress port of the Ethernet network, they are
decapsulated into the ATM cells and then forwarded to their
destination. Figure 1 also shows the involved protocol layers.
At the user plane of the RNC or NodeB, higher layer data
entering the UTRAN, e.g. packets of speech data from an
AMR codec, is carried via the Frame Protocol (FP) PDUs
through the Iub interface. These FP PDUs are segmented into
AAL2 packets and transmitted as ATM cells to the ATM
links. In the ATM-IP router, the ATM cells are received from
either RNC or NodeB through an ATM Virtual Circuit (VC).
At the ATM interface of the router, the ATM cells are
captured and delivered to the PWE layer. Here the ATM cells
are concatenated into a PWE payload and PWE protocol
overheads and control information (e.g. specifying the ATM
service to be emulated in this case) are added. The
encapsulated PWE frames are then sent downwards through
UDP, IP and Ethernet. At last Ethernet packets are created and
transmitted via the Ethernet link to other side. A reverse
process occurs at the router of the other end, where PWE
payloads are retrieved and the carried ATM cells are extracted
and sent via the ATM link to destination node.
B. PWE Parameters
Pseudo-Wire solutions allow network operators to control
two parameters that can affect the PWE frame size and
resultant delay and jitter. Nc: maximum number of ATM cells
allowed to be concatenated into one PWE frame; Tc:
maximum waiting time for the concatenation of ATM cells
into a PWE frame; this determines the maximum waiting time
if less than Nc PDUs are in the buffer. Each Ethernet frame
includes a dedicated header, so a large setting of Nc and Tc
minimizes the overhead per service PDU, which in turn results
in higher efficiency. Nevertheless, the larger these parameters
are configured, the higher is the additional delay and delay
variance inferred by PWE. This can be seen in Figure 2. Thus,
by means of these parameters the overhead and the resulting
quality impact have to be carefully balanced to achieve a
suitable Iub delay not exceeding its inherent delay boundary.
III. PERFORMANCE METRICS AND QOS CRITERIAS
A. Delay
As mentioned above, UTRAN has to fulfill stringent delay
and delay variation requirements in order to assure the QoS
according to the types of services as well as to protect the
delay-intolerant signaling and control protocols. As shown in
Figure 1, the major PWE delay contributors at the Iub include:
Figure 1: Protocol Stack of Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN using PWE
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PWE Concatenation Delay: the time consumed by the
concatenation process, where the ATM cells are
encapsulated into PWE frame in PWE concatenation buffer.
This delay depends on the inter-arrival time of ATM cells
as well as the setting of Nc and Tc.
PWE Encoding Delay: the time after a complete PWE
frame is formed until the delivery of the PWE packets to
the Ethernet link. This delay consists of two parts: (1) The
processing time for encoding a PWE packet to an Ethernet
packet. (2) The time spent waiting in the Ethernet buffer
until the Ethernet packet is transmitted. This is directly
related to the Iub bandwidth on the Ethernet link.
Ethernet Switch Delay: the time spent within the
intermediate Ethernet Switch between two routers.
Additionally, the FP PDU Delay needs to be measured. It is the
delay to transport one FP PDU from the NodeB to the RNC
over the TNL. It includes the delay of the ATM part as well as
the above mentioned three PWE delay components. For each
delay, the average delay and jitter are observed in the
simulations. The jitter is defined as the deviation between the
maximum and minimum delay of every 100ms.
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Figure 2: Impact of Nc and Tc on the delay and efficiency
B. Bandwidth Efficiency
The Bandwidth Efficiency is defined as the Information-to-
Carrier Packet Length ratio. For the ATM-based UTRAN, this
is upper layer IP throughput over the ATM link throughput;
and for the PWE-based UTRAN it is the IP throughput over
Ethernet link throughput. The effective bandwidth utilization
in the RAN, especially on the last mile links towards the
NodeBs, is directly related to the transport costs. High
bandwidth efficiency reduces the RAN expenses.
C. Packet Loss
Due to the need for synchronous data transfer in the
UTRAN downlink, excessively delayed FP PDUs will be
discarded at the NodeB, as they cannot be sent over the air
interface during the allocated time slot. It is an indication of
congestion of the Iub link. Following the packet loss ratio is
also referred to as delayed FP PDU ratio.
D. Throughput
The Throughput refers to the throughput of the physical
link. For the ATM-based UTRAN, the ATM link throughput
is measured. In Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN the
throughput is measured for both ATM link and Ethernet link.
E. QoS Criteria of UTRAN
In the present work, the acceptable FP PDU delay value
considered for 99% of the transmissions for voice service is
10ms and 30ms for data services. Moreover, for both, voice
and data services, the FP PDU delay jitter should be less than
15ms for 99% of the transmissions. These requirements need
to be satisfied to determine the required Iub link bandwidth.
IV. SIMULATION DESCRIPTION
A. Simulation Scenario
In this paper, we study only single Pseudo-Wire scenario as
shown in Figure 1. It consists of 1 NodeB, 1 RNC and 2
ATM_IP routers for interworking with ATM and IP dual-
stack, within which the PWE en- and decapsulation algorithms
are implemented. Between the two routers, an Ethernet switch
is used. In this scenario, two Ethernet links with a link-rate of
1Gbps and 100Mbps are configured for RNC and NodeB side
respectively, but the leased Ethernet bandwidth for the Iub
interface is 2.09 Mbps. Both RNC and NodeB are connected
to their ATM-IP routers via a 2Mbps ATM E1 link. The
reserved Iub bandwidth at the Ethernet part is set to a slightly
higher value than the bandwidth for ATM in order to
incorporate a margin for the overheads of PWE.
B. Traffic Model
In this paper, a mix of data and voice traffic is evaluated. For
the packet switched data services (web browsing) the ETSI
traffic model [9] and for voice services a traffic model
specified in the MOMENTUM project [10] is used.
Traffic Model: web application
Parameter Distribution and value
Reading Time Geometric distribution
Mean = 5 second
Page Size Pareto distribution
Mean = 25 Kbyte
Traffic Model: voice
Parameter Distribution and value
Voice Codec Adaptive Multi Rate (AMR)
Silence / Speech period Exponential distribution
Mean = 3 second
Session duration Exponential distribution
Mean = 120 second
Table 1: Traffic Model
For web application a packet switched Radio Access Bearer
(RAB) of 64kbps is used on both uplink and downlink, and
voice is transmitted with AMR and circuit switched RAB of
12.2 kbps. In this configuration, there is a strict AAL2 priority
for voice over web traffic at the RNC and NodeB to guarantee
the delay requirements of the voice users.
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V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
In this section the results of the performance analysis of
Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN under a PS dominant traffic
scenario are presented. They include the resultant delay, jitter
and transport efficiency on the Iub interface and compare it to
the ATM-based UTRAN. The capacity of the NodeB is
2Mbps supporting three cells each serving around 8 voice
users and 12 web users. The generated ATM link throughput
is around 1.4Mbps and the total traffic load consists of 82%
web traffic. Different PWE parameter settings (Nc, Tc) are
investigated to determine the optimum PWE configuration.
.
(27, 15ms) (22, 8ms) (16, 5ms) (9, 3ms)
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ATM:ATM Link Throughput
PWE:ATM Link Throughput
PWE:Ethernet Link Throughput
Figure 3: Link Throughput
Figure 3 shows the link throughput over different (Nc,Tc)
combinations. It can be seen that with the decrease of (Nc,Tc)
settings the Ethernet link throughput in the Carrier Ethernet-
based UTRAN is increased, whereas the ATM link throughput
maintains constant as it is not influenced by the PWE
configurations. The gap between the ATM link throughput and
Ethernet link throughput represents the overhead of the
transport network layer. The increased Ethernet link
throughput by smaller (Nc, Tc) is because that more PWE
overhead are generated to carry the same amount of user data
since smaller Nc and Tc settings lead to smaller PWE frame
sizes. The corresponding bandwidth efficiency is compared in
Figure 4. The efficiency of the Carrier Ethernet-based
UTRAN is in general lower than the ATM based, independent
of the (Nc, Tc) settings. This is due to the extra PWE and
Ethernet overheads. Besides, while Nc and Tc decrease, the
efficiency of Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN declines as a
consequence of larger overheads (refer to Figure 2). However,
the average FP PDU delays of web traffic and voice are
significantly improved when the Nc and Tc settings are
decreased, as illustrated in Figure 5. Because with lower Tc
and Nc values, the number of concatenated ATM cells and the
maximum encapsulation time are lower, the PWE
concatenation delay is reduce being the major contributor of
the FP PDU delay. It is also visible that the FP PDU delay in
the ATM-based UTRAN is lower than in the PWE
configuration. The extra delay for PWE is due to additional
protocol overheads for the encapsulation of ATM cells
requiring a longer transmission delay; in addition extra
concatenation and switching delays are generated in the
routers and Ethernet switch.
(27,15ms) (22, 8ms) (16, 5ms) (9, 3ms)
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Figure 4: Bandwidth Efficiency
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ATM (voice)
Carrier Ethernet (voice)
Figure 5: Average FP PDU Delays
Figure 6 depicts the ratio of delayed FP PDUs that needed
be discarded at the base station in the Carrier Ethernet-based
UTRAN. It is observed that with decreased (Nc, Tc) values,
the delayed FP PDUs of web traffic increases, though the
average FP PDU delay is reduced (Figure 5). The reason is
that smaller values of Nc and Tc cause a higher Ethernet link
throughput as seen in Figure 3. With higher link throughput, it
is more probable to experience the link congestion which leads
to abrupt delay variations at the transmission buffer of the
Ethernet layer, where the shaping rate for the Iub interface is
restricted to 2.09Mbps in our scenario. This contributes to a
larger PWE encoding delay variation. On the other hand, as
voice traffic has higher priority than web traffic, the
experienced FP PDU delay variations for voice is much
smaller and therefore it obtains much lower delayed FP PDU
ratio than web traffic. The extreme case of voice is under large
(Nc, Tc) setting (Nc=27, Tc=15ms). In this case, there is a
significantly larger delayed FP PDU ratio. The reason is that
the configured Tc of 15ms is longer than the voice delay
constraints of 10ms. Hence with Nc of 27 the PWE3 needs to
wait for 27 ATM cells to be encapsulated into a PWE frame
before the timer expires. If the offered traffic is not able to
always assure 27 ATM cells to arrive for the concatenation
before the timer expires, the timeout probability is relatively
high. So there is a higher chance for a longer concatenation
delay which leads to a relatively higher probability of
instantaneous FP PDU delay larger than 10ms. So in general it
is suggested to set Tc below the delay constrains required at
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the Iub. Another important delay QoS criterion is jitter. In this
investigation, the FP PDU delay jitter of both voice and data
services should be less than 15ms. Figure 7 shows the ratio of
FP PDU delay jitter exceeding 15ms boundary. As it can be
seen, the FP PDU delay jitter of voice is lower than that of
web traffic, not only because it has a smaller FP PDU size but
also because it has higher priority in the transmission. For both
web and voice traffic, the experienced jitter is decreased with
lower Tc and Nc, as smaller Tc and Nc settings reduce the gap
between min. and max. values of the PWE concatenation
delay. Here the rise of jitter for voice at (Nc=9, Tc=3ms) is
mainly caused by a higher PWE encoding delay variation as a
result of the increased Ethernet link throughput. In the ATM-
based UTRAN the obtained delayed FP PDU ratio and the FP
PDU delay jitter are lower than with the Carrier Ethernet-
based UTRAN. This is due to the lower transport overhead in
the ATM transport and the resulting lower link throughput.
With smaller ATM cells the traffic is additionally less bursty.
(27, 15ms) (22, 8ms) (16, 5ms) (9, 3ms)
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web traffic
voice
Figure 6: Delayed FP PDU ratio
(27, 15ms) (22, 8mms) (16, 5ms) (9, 3ms)
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ratio of FP PDU delay jitter > 15ms (Carrier Ethernet)
web traffic
voice
Figure 7: FP PDU Delay Jitter
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we discuss the deployment of Carrier Ethernet
for the transport network in UTRAN, and give a quantitative
evaluation on its performance, in particular the experienced
delay, jitter and packet loss, and achievable bandwidth
efficiency on the Iub interface. Simulation results show that
using Carrier Ethernet by means of Pseudo-Wire (PWE) to
replace the ATM-based transport in UTRAN, the achieved
transmission efficiency becomes lower due to the extra PWE
and Ethernet overheads. In addition, the delays and jitters
experienced at the Iub interface tend to increase as a result of
larger transport packet format as well as the extra
concatenation and switching delays in the intermediate routers
and switches. However, by adjusting PWE configurations it is
possible to find a tradeoff between efficiency and the delay
performance in the Carrier Ethernet-based UTRAN. From the
present investigations, it is found that the larger setting of Nc
and Tc can result in higher bandwidth efficiency but also
induce longer average delay and larger jitter. While with small
values of (Nc,Tc) pairs, larger PWE overhead will be
generated which leads to higher link throughput and in turn
increased probability of congestion. This causes more FP
PDUs discarded. Therefore, the setting of Nc and Tc should be
configured in a medium range, not too large and also not too
small. The network operation has to consider which factor is
more important to the specific traffic scenario, is it more
efficiency-critical or time-critical, in order to decide the
optimal (Nc,Tc) pair. Besides, the Ethernet bandwidth should
be configured higher than the ATM link for accommodating
the additional PWE and Ethernet overheads. In this work we
only study single Pseudo-Wire scenario. Further work will
consider network scenario of multiple NodeBs where either
each NodeB sets up individual Pseudo-Wire or a group of
NodeB share a common Pseudo-Wire to the RNC, in this case
PWE encoding delay and Concatenation Delay are strongly
dependent on the number of Pseudo-Wires and how many
NodeBs served by one Pseudo-Wire.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is carried out within the research project Mature
(Modeling and Analysis of the Transport Network Layer in the
UTRAN Access Network REsearch). The partner of this work
is the Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG, Germany.
REFERENCES
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[2] A. Bolle, H. Herbertsson, Backhaul must make room for HSDPA,
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[3] Converging an ALL IP mobile transport on Carrier Ethernet networks,
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[4] IETF RFC 3916: Requirements for Pseudo-Wire Emulation Edge-to-Edge
(PWE3), September 2004
[5] IETF RFC 3985: Pseudo Wire Emulation Edge-to-Edge (PWE3)
Architecture, March 2005
[6] IETF, RFC 4717: Encapsulation Methods for Transport of Asynchronous
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