Course OWJ103104

WCDMA Load Control

ISSUE 1.1

OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Load Control................................................................................................................... 2
1.1 Abbreviations........................................................................................................................ 2
1.2 Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 2
1.3 Load Measurement.............................................................................................................. 3
1.3.1 WCDMA Load Concept.............................................................................................. 3
1.3.2 UL Load and Measurement.......................................................................................5
1.3.3 DL Load Definition..................................................................................................... 6
1.3.4 The Load Situations................................................................................................... 7
1.4 Call Admission Control......................................................................................................... 8
1.4.2 UL CAC Algorithm 1................................................................................................... 9
1.4.3 DL CAC Algorithm 1................................................................................................. 10
1.4.4 DL CAC Algorithm 2, UL CAC algorithm 2...............................................................10
1.5 Load Balance..................................................................................................................... 11
1.5.1 Inter-freq LDB.......................................................................................................... 12
1.5.2 Intra-freq LDB.......................................................................................................... 12
1.6 Congestion Control............................................................................................................ 13

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Load Control
1.1 Abbreviations
CAC

Call Admission Control

RTWP:

Received Total Wideband Power

UL:

Uplink

DL:

Downlink

MAI: Multiple Access Interference.

TCP: Transmitted Carrier Power
SAC: Same Area Cell
LCC: Load Congestion Control
BE:

Best Effort

TF:

Transport Format

1.2 Introduction
Load control is needed for WCDMA system as well as other systems to keep the
system working in stable state. However for a CDMA based system, cell capacity is
varied as the user moving and the propagation conditions varied in cells, further more
in 3G system, comparing with other wireless systems, more service types are
included, the load of one connection is different for different type of service. For data
service, the data rate is varying dramatically as time being. It means even for a data
connection, the load caused is varying. So we can see that the load control for
WCDMA system is much more important and should pay more attentions to.

The 1st topic well face is how to measure the system load, since the WCDMA system
capacity is soft, i.e. varying.

Based on the load measurement, kinds of load control methods can be applied. They
are admission control, load balance and congestion control.

Admission control is used to evaluate if a resource request can be accepted or not.

Load balance is used to balance the load among neighboring cells.
And the congestion control is used to draw the system back from very high load
status.

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

In the following sections, the load measurement, admission control, load balance and
congestion control are described in detail.

1.3 Load Measurement

Generally, load means system capability consumption. Since the load of any system
is limited, its important for any system to control the load under the safe range.
However, for a whole system, the capacity or the load is usually decided by the bottleneck part. For example, in a computer, you can see the CPU load, the hard-disk W/R
rate, the I/O rate, the bus speed, etc. Its the one with the lowest capacity deciding the
capacity of the computer.

For wireless communication systems, we should focus more on the air interface,
since the radio resource is much more precious.

1.3.1 WCDMA Load Concept

Note:
1)
2)

In this section, we discussed why the capacity on the air interface is limited. In
discussion, some simplifications are used. These simplifications are only applied
in this section.
In discussion, the UL is taken as example, but the principle deduced is also
applicable to the DL, although, in downlink therere some differences.

We know that for a connection which can work well, the only requirement is that the
received signal is good enough:

pi
R
E
i b
i i
No W
I pi

(1)

Here the Eb/No is the required minimum bit energy and noise density ratio, and Ri is
the data rate, i is the activity factor, W is the chip rate, pi is the received signal
power and I is the total interference.

To find out the system capacity theory, we can just look at the minimum requirement,
i.e.:

pi

i pi i I
I pi
1 i

(2)

We define pi Li I and obtain the load factor Li of one connection.

Li

1
1

1
i

(3)

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Lets consider a single cell with number of users in it, and take the uplink into
consideration. Then for each user/connection, the interference consists of three parts:
other users power, the interference from the user itself, and the background noise.

I I other I own PN

(4)

All the other users power will directly cause the interference to the user in concern.

I other p j
j i

(5)

I p j I own PN
j i

To simplify the deduction, we can assume that the other users power is much larger
than ith user power, then:

I p j PN L j I PN
j

(6)

Together with equation (2), we can get:

I
1
1

PN 1 L j 1 UL

(7)

Where UL is defined as the load factor.

Assuming that in the cell, only one kind of service is in use. Then:

I
1

PN
1 n.L j
Here, n is the number of users in the cell.
Since the interference power must be positive and finite, the number of users n must
be limited.

Example:
Provided that all services in a cell are same, then we can simplify the equation as
below:

NR

1 n L

1
1 n

1
W
1
( E b / N 0 ) R j j

Here n is the number of users in the cell. NR is the noise rise

I
.
PN

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

We can see from the equation that the NR is rise as the number of users increasing,
at the same time, the higher the data rate R, the NR is higher, also the higher the
required signal quality

Eb

N o , the NR will be higher.

14
12

NoiseRise(dB)

10
8
6
4
2
0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5
0.6
LoadFactor

0.7

0.8

0.9

Figure 1.1 Noise vs. Load factor.

Generally, why the air interface capacity is limited is because of the multiple access
interference (MAI), every users power will disturb other users communication.

1.3.2 UL Load and Measurement

Based on the discussion in the above section, taken into account the service activity
factor, other cells interference and the interference of the user itself that is already
included in the Eb/No requirements, we can rewrite the formula (6) as :

NR

PN

W /( i Ri )
1

( Eb / N 0 ) i

1 (1 f )

1
1 ul

(8)

Here the i is the service activity factor; f is the ratio of other cell to own cell.
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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

The ul is UL load factor, directly corresponding to the UL load as illustrated in figure

1.
From the equation above, we can have two difference definition of the UL load
measurement: (1) interference based definition and (2) Traffic based definition.

1. Interference based definition: RTWP

Look at the left side of the equation (7), since the background noise P N is a constant,
the interference I can be used as the measurement of UL load. The interference I in
fact can be measured on by NodeB received total wideband power (RTWP).
Then we can have the load factor measurement as:

UL 1

Backgroud noise
RTWP

(9)

Based on the definition above, we can get the system load by RTWP measurement.

2. Traffic based definition: NTF

Look at the right side of the equation (7) and the definition of ul ,

W /( i Ri )
1

( Eb / N 0 ) i

ul (1 f )

. (10)

We can also directly get load information from the services themselves.
Further more, we can define an ideal standard service as a 12.2 kbps speech service
with activity factor equal to 1. Then any one kind of service can be normalized by this
standard service as number of standard services. The normalized number is
normalization traffic factor (NTF).

ki

Ec

Ec

N0 i

N 0 s tan dard

(11)

By this way, we can just count the number of standard services in the system to get
the system Load, without measurement on any power information.

1.3.3 DL Load Definition

For DL, if we left out common channel power, i.e. the total cell transmission power is
the sum of the channel power of all users in the cell. In the similar way as deduction
the UL load, we can get the equation as below:

Ptotal

( Eb / N o ) j
Lm , j
j W /( j R )

N
(E / No ) j
L
1 b
( m , j )
j W /( j R )
i 1,i m Li , j
PN

(12)

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Here, Li , j is path loss between ith base station and the jth mobile, Ptotal is the base
station transmitted power, is the non-orthogonal factor because WCDMA employs
orthogonal codes in the downlink to separate users, and without any multipath
propagation the orthogonaliry remains when the base station signal is received by the
mobile.

Comparing with equation (7), we can see the downlink has the similar limitation on
the air interface due to MAI interference.

So we can use the DL total transmission power as the DL load measurement.

Also we can just use the NTF as the load measurement.

1.3.4 The Load Situations

Once we have the load measurement, we can evaluate the load situations.
As the following figure shown, the load situation can be divided into 3 phase: stable
state, just stable state and the unstable state.

Figure 1.1 Load phases ( take the UL as example)

Just as the figure 1-2 shown, taking UL as example, in the stable load phase, the
noise will rise slowly as the load increased, in the just stable phase the noise will rise
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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

faster as the load increased, while in the unstable phase, i.e. the congestion phase,
the noise will increase dramatically as the load increased.

According to the different load situations, different load control mechanism should be
applied.

The CAC is always running, and only admit resource request that will not cause the
unstable situation of the load.

The congestion control is started once the system goes into the unstable situation to
reduce the load and make the system load back to the just stable or stable situation.

1.4 Call Admission Control

The call admission work flow is as below figure.
c a ll a r r iv e
G e t th e s e r v ic e c h a r a c t e r is tic a n d th e c u r r e n t l o a d

S u p p o s e th e u s e r is a c c e p te d , a n d c a lc u la te th e p re d ic te d
U L lo a d fa c to r. A n d th e n c o m p a re d w ith th e th re s h o ld .

a d m itte d ?

y
S u p p o s e th e u s e r is a c c e p te d , a n d
c a lc u la te th e p r e d ic te d D L lo a d fa c to r .
A n d th e n c o m p a re d w ith th e th r e s h o ld .

a d m itte d ?

y
c a ll a d m itte d

c a ll re je c te d

end

Figure 1.1 CAC work flow

We can see from the figure that when new resource request arrived, both the UL and
DL load should be checked.

We should also notice that the CAC is triggered by the resource requests which could
include both new call request and channel reconfiguration request.
8

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Based on the load definition in section 1.3, therere 2 CAC algorithms.

1.4.2 UL CAC Algorithm 1

Admission request

UL 1

Get current RTWP, and calculate the

current load factor.

Get the traffic characteristic, and estimate

the increment of load factor.

PN
RTWP

1
W
Eb

N0

Calculate the predicted load factor.

UL _ predicted UL 0
Smaller than the
threshold?

n
y
admitted

rejected

end of UL CAC
Figure 1.1 UL CAC algorithm 1

We can see from figure 1-4 that the UL CAC algorithm 1 employed the load definition
based on RTWP as the load measurement.

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

1.4.3 DL CAC Algorithm 1

Admission request

P(N )

Get current TCP.

Get the traffic characteristic, and

estimate the increment of tcp.

Calculate the predicted tcp.

Smaller than the

threshold?

P( N ) P Pcomm

y
rejected

admitted

end of DL CAC
Figure 1.1 DL CAC algorithm 1

In figure 1-5, the DL CAC algorithm 1, the DL transmitted carrier power (TCP, i.e. the
DL total transmission power) is used as the downlink load indicator.

1.4.4 DL CAC Algorithm 2, UL CAC algorithm 2

In fact, the same algorithm work flow is used for both DL algorithm #2 and UL
algorithm #2.

10

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Admission request
N

K ( N ) ki
i 1

Get current total NTF.

k N 1

Get the traffic characteristic, and

estimate the increment of NTF.

Calculate the predicted NTF.

Smaller than the

threshold?

Ec

N0 N 1
Ec N0 standard

K ( N 1) K ( N ) kN 1

y
rejected

admitted

end of UL/DL CAC

Figure 1.1 the algorithm 2 for both UL and DL.

For both DL and UL algorithm 2, the load definition based on NTF (normalized traffic
factor) is used.

We shall note that, the UL and DL algorithms can be flexibly selected by algorithm
switch independently.

1.5 Load Balance

In real system, the users are probably distributed unequally. That means in some cells
the load could be very high while the load of its neighboring cells are low. In this
situation, if we can move some users from high load cell to low load cell, i.e. to
balance the load among cells, we can get the system capacity gain.

Here well discuss two kinds of load balance mechanisms. One is between interfrequency cells and the other is between intra-freq cells.

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

1.5.1 Inter-freq LDB

The inter-freq LDB is applied only on the same area (inter-freq neighboring) cells.
Once a cells load is higher than its SAC cell, some users will be selected to be hardhandover to the SAC cell. The inter-freq LDB work flow is as the following figure.

Measure transmitted
carrier power
Ptx(m),m=1,2,...M

i < N?

n
Get Ptx,max and Ptx,min from
Ptx (m)

Ptx,max > Padjust

&
Ptx,max - Ptx,min >
Pdifference

y
Select one suitable user
in the highest loaded
cell, and attempt to be
handover to the lowest
loaded cell.

Successful?

y
i + 1
Initialize the hard
handover attempt counter
i=0

Wait for next period

Figure 1.1 inter-freq LDB algorithm work flow

1.5.2 Intra-freq LDB

When un-balanced load situation happens among intra-freq neighboring cells, the
loads also could be balanced. The inter-freq LDB is also called cell breath.
In intra-freq LDB, once load un-balance happens between intra-freq cells, the
common pilot channel power in the high load cell will be decreased and the pilot
channel power of its neighboring cell will be increased. i.e. the high-load cell coverage
shrinks while its neighboring cell coverage spreads. By changing the coverage, some
user on the border will be handover to the low-load neighboring cells automatically.
The intra-freq LDB algorithm work flow is as the below figure:

12

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Measure transmitted
carrier power Ptx

Ptx < Pexpand

&
PCPICH < P CPICH,max

Ptx > Pshrink

&
P CPICH > P CPICH, min

Increase the PCPICH

one step

Decrease the PCPICH

one step

Wait for next period

Figure 1.1 intra-freq LDB

In LDB, to simplify the balance procedure and ensure the balance effectiveness, the
user will high load factor will be selected.

1.6 Congestion Control

Refer to Error: Reference source not found, in the unstable or congestion phase, any
minor load fluctuation may drive the system outage.

Due to the radio propagation environment varying and the mobile movement, though
we have CAC and Load Balance, the system load could vary significantly and make
the system goes from the stable state to the unstable state.
In the congestion (unstable) state, some kinds of fast control methods must be
employed.

In the current version, the LCC (Load Congestion Control) algorithm is included. This
algorithm is used to reduce the DL BE service data rate and reduce the system load
quickly.

Once congestion happens, the network side MAC will quickly limit the downlink
available transport formats (TF) and thus limit the DL data rate. The LCC work flow is
as the following:

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OWJ103104 WCDMA Load Control ISSUE1.1

Chapter 1 Load Control

Monitor Cell Carrier Power

Periodically or by event

If Carrier Power >

Congestion threshold, or
receive a event
Congestion Detected
and inform MAC

Congestion Relieved
and infrom MAC

MAC decrease the

max TF number

Kill the Adjust Timer

Start a Adjust Timer

MAC increase the

max TF number

expires

expires
Start a Recover Timer

Figure 1.1 LCC work flow

14

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