Effect of Measurement Bandwidth to the Accuracy of Inter-frequency RSRP Measurements in LTE

Janne Kurjenniemi
Magister Solutions Ltd. c/o Mattilanniemi 8, 40100 Jyv skyl , Finland a a Email: Janne.Kurjenniemi@magister.

Tero Henttonen
Nokia P.O.Box 407, 00045 Nokia Group, Finland Email: tero.henttonen@nokia.com

AbstractIn this paper we study the effect of Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) measurement bandwidth on the accuracy of handovers and the UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) system performance. In 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) it has been agreed that inter-frequency RSRP measurement requirements would be developed assuming 6 middle physical resource blocks measurement bandwidth, which has also been agreed to be used for developing intra-frequency RSRP measurement requirements. Wider handover measurement bandwidth could potentially provide better averaging against fading and thus, reduce the time required for performing inter-frequency handover measurements. These studies are conducted with fully dynamic time-driven system simulator and simulations are done with different RSRP measurement bandwidths and different lters. Based on these studies wider bandwidth provides only minor improvement in measurement accuracy and it does not clearly reduce the time required for performing measurements.

The rest of this paper is constructed as follows. Studied handover algorithm and measurements are presented in Section II followed by description of simulation scenario in Section III. Then in Section IV simulation results are analyzed and nally conclusions are drawn in Section V. II. H ANDOVERS IN LTE LTE system supports mobility via E-UTRAN utilized a userassisted hard handover algorithm: Users measure downlink signal quality and send measurement reports to eNodeB either periodically or when an event (such as another eNodeB becoming stronger than that current eNodeB) triggers. The eNodeB then makes the nal handover decision based on the measurement reports and negotiates the handover with the user and target eNodeB. Measurement averaging, handover margins and timers are used in order to avoid excess or ping-pong handovers. During a handover the old serving eNodeB ushes HARQ Stop-andWait (SAW) buffers, which means that packets still waiting for a retransmission should be forwarded to target cell or they are lost. Also, the user cannot be scheduled while handover is in progress, which may lead to additional delays for data. After the connection to the new eNodeB is established both HARQ and PS processes continue normally. A. Measurements UE measurements for the handovers are dened in 3GPP specications in [3]. RSRP is measured for each cell as the linear average over the power contributions of the resource elements that carry cell-specic reference signals within the considered measurement frequency bandwidth. The reference signals are dened in 3GPP specication [4]. If receiver diversity is in use by the UE, the reported value shall be equivalent to the linear average of the power values of all diversity branches. 1) Gap-assisted inter-frequency measurements: LTE requires the use of measurement gaps for measuring cells for inter-frequency or inter-system handovers. The structure of measurement gaps is illustrated in Fig. 1. The actual measurement time is affected by the margin, which is needed for changing the reception frequency and possibly conguring the receiver to another Radio Access Technology (RAT).

I. I NTRODUCTION Within 3 Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specications are currently done for the UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) i.e. Evolved UTRAN (E-UTRAN) which aims at ambitious goals to provide spectral efciency gain in the order of 3-4 compared to e.g. 3GPP Release 6 High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). For the LTE downlink Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is considered to be the best access technology for providing high scalability up to large system bandwidths and to facilitate advanced frequency-domain scheduling methods ([1], [2]). Furthermore, to achieve the objectives set for LTE, advanced Radio Resource Management (RRM) functions have been dened including e.g. Hybrid ARQ (HARQ), Link Adaptation (LA), Channel Quality Indication (CQI), Packet Scheduling (PS) and Handover Control (HC). LTE is based on distributed architecture, so eNodeBs are responsible for handover decisions. Handovers are crucial part of the cellular systems and as LTE is targeted to operate with wide range of UE velocities, UE based measurements should be carefully studied to enable robust handovers in different environments and UE velocities. Furthermore, in order to perform inter-frequency handover the UE needs to identify an inter-frequency cell using synchronization channels that are transmitted using the 6 middle Resource Blocks (RB) and then perform RSRP measurements. In this paper we study potential performance benets that wider RSRP measurement bandwidth could provide for wider bandwidth options.
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978-1-4244-2644-7/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE

2) Synchronization: In order to perform inter-frequency handover the UE needs to identity an inter-frequency cell using synchronization channels that are transmitted using the 6 middle PRBs and then perform RSRP measurements for a given measurement reporting. The ltering of inter-frequency RSRP measurements is expected to be performed over a certain measurement period, which remain unchanged for a given congured gap pattern. Cell identication time prior to the RSRP measurements depends on Signal to Noise and Interference Ratio (SINR) and radio propagation conditions. The total time required for RSRP measurements depends on factors like the set event-trigger reporting criteria and other network RRM strategies involved with the inter-frequency handover decision making and thereby measurement gap activation time. As cell identication is always performed using the same 6 middle PRBs, the performance of cell identication does not vary as function of different RSRP measurement bandwidths. When comparing the impacts of different RSRP measurement bandwidths the reliability of handover evaluation is one important measure. Additionally, it is of course important to understand whether wider RSRP measurement bandwidth could clearly reduce the total handover delay and gap pattern activation. B. Inter-frequency handovers Inter-frequency handovers are typically less critical than intra-frequency handovers when frequency reuse is 1. The most critical inter-frequency handover scenarios could be seen to the ones where the UE reaches the coverage edge of the current serving frequency layer and thereby needs to make a coverage based inter-frequency handover. Furthermore, in coverage based inter-frequency handover a scenario, where also the strongest cell on the other frequency layer is weak (i.e. cell border/handover area), is probably one of the worst cases in terms of handover performance. These worst case scenarios are expected to be the ones that limit the interfrequency handover performance. However, naturally shorter measurement gap pattern activation times in good conditions for inter-frequency handover evaluation also benet the EUTRA system as the network has to put less effort in scheduling gap patterns for different UEs. However, it is worth noting that longer gap patterns in E-UTRA do not have the same impacts on E-UTRA system performance as compressed mode in UTRA. More information about the network effects of compressed mode in WCDMA can be found from [5].

III. S IMULATION SCENARIO This study has been performed using a fully dynamic time driven system simulator which simulates UL and DL directions simultaneously with a symbol resolution. In addition to detailed handover algorithm simulator includes modeling of advanced RRM algorithms like Time Domain (TD) and Frequency Domain (FD) Packet Scheduling (PS), Link Adaptation (LA), Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) and Hybrid ARQ (HARQ). In these simulations we have used Proportional Fair (PF) scheduler in both time and frequency domain. More information about PS modeling in used system simulator can be found e.g. from [6]. The simulator models the RSRP based hard handovers based on UE measurements: Each UE does continuous measurements of its neighbor cells with certain periodicity and ltering parameters, and then periodically sends measurement reports of its ltered measurements to eNodeB. A handover is triggered in eNodeB when the neighbor cell RSRP is found to be larger than own cell RSRP plus a handover margin for a duration of a timer (called Time-To-Trigger). When the handover is done, the HARQ buffers are always ushed and any data in them is either lost or requires ARQ retransmission (in case L2 ARQ is used). These simulations were carried out on single frequency layer. However, in order to emulate the inter-frequency handovers, gap-assisted RSRP measurements were used for evaluating the best cell and for making the actual handover decisions. These RSRP measurements were made assuming 6 ms gaps, with either 40 ms or 120 ms gap periodicity. Three different measurement bandwidth options were studied, namely 6 Physical Resource Blocks (PRB) (1.25 MHz), 25 PRBs (5 MHz) and 50 PRBs (10 MHz). As the main motivation was to evaluate the improvement obtainable by wider measurement bandwidths in terms of handover delay, no time-to-trigger value was assumed in handover triggering. The simulations without time-to-trigger value can also be seen as the most sensitive case to differences between different RSRP measurement bandwidths in handover evaluation. The evaluated scenario consists of 7 active sites (21 cells). UE mobility is constrained inside these cells and statistics are gathered from these sites. In addition 12 interfering sites are included. The load in interfering sites is mirrored from center sites, resulting uniform interference conditions over whole simulation scenario. Most relevant simulation parameters are listed in Table I. To evaluate the impact of measurement bandwidth to EUTRA system performance we have collected the number of handovers, spectrum efciency and RSRP measurements from the simulations. To be able to study the possible improvement in terms of gap activation period, the performance metrics were evaluated using different RSRP lter lengths by varying the number of consecutive measurement gaps used in the RSPP ltering. In the simulations the RSRP ltering is applied over N consecutive measurement gaps (with one RSRP measurement / gap) in a sliding window manner, step

Fig. 1.

Measurement gap.

TABLE I S IMULATION PARAMETERS . 3GPP Macro Cell Scenario Inter site distance (ISD) Number of UEs per sector Antenna pattern Distance-dependent path loss Shadowing standard deviation Shadowing correlation (cells) Shadowing correlation (sectors) Operation bandwidth (BW) Duplexing Number of sub-carriers Sub-carrier spacing Resource block bandwidth Sub-frame length Reuse factor No. of symbols per TTI No. of data symbols per TTI No. of control symbols per TTI Multipath delay prole Trafc model UE Speed Time-To-Trigger HO Margin Receiver diversity Measurement BW Measurement Interval Measurement Period Measurement Error Cell layout 57 sectors 500 m 10 70-degree sectored beam 128.1 + 37.6 log 10(r) 8 dB 0.5 1.0 10 MHz FDD 600 15 kHz 375 kHz 1 ms 1 14 10 4 Typical Urban (TU20) FTP NO TCP 3 km/h, 30km/h and 120 km/h 0 ms 3 dB 2RX MRC 1.25 MHz, 5 MHz and 10 MHz 40 ms and 120 ms For 40 ms: 0 ms, 40 ms, 120 ms For 120 ms: 0 ms, 120 ms, 240 ms 0

40 ms gap interval 1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 CDF 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 110 100 90 80 RSRP [dBm] 3 km/h, BW1 3 km/h, BW2 3 km/h, Full BW 30 km/h, BW1 30 km/h, BW2 30 km/h, Full BW 120 km/h, BW1 120 km/h, BW2 120 km/h, Full BW 70 60 50

Fig. 2. CDF of RSRP measurements with different bandwidths with 40 ms periodicity.

measurement gaps difference between different measurement bandwidths can be further reduced. B. Spectral efciencies In Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 the achieved spectral efciency is shown for different UE velocities and RSRP measurement bandwidths and gap periodicities. The achieved spectral efciency is dominantly affected by the velocity and practically no difference can be seen between different measurement bandwidths options or the RSRP ltering periods as suggested by RSRP measurement CDF in Fig. 2. Note that the impact to spectral efciency due to measurement gaps and delayed handovers is not visible in these simulations since the two frequency layer operation was only emulated in the simulations. C. Number of handovers The total number of handovers is summarised in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 for 40ms and 120ms gap periodicity, respectively.
3 km/h

size being one gap repetition interval. The evaluated values for the number of consecutive measurement gaps were one (i.e. handover evaluation based on single gap measurement), two and four. These can be translated to corresponding time periods (in terms of additional delay introduced to handover evaluation) of (N 1) times gap interval i.e. with 40 ms gap periodicity: 0 ms, 40 ms and 120 ms. IV. S IMULATION RESULT ANALYSIS A. RSRP measurements As noted in Section II-A, different measurement bandwidth options evaluated were 6 PRBs (1.25 MHz), 25 PRBs (5 MHz) and 50 PRBs (10 MHz). These are labeled in gures presented as BW1, BW2 and Full BW, respectively. In Fig. 2 Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of RSRP measurement is presented with different measurement bandwidths and UE velocities. The gure shows that UE velocity dominates and mainly the difference in RSRP can be seen between different velocities. High end of CDF curves with different velocities are about the same and the difference is mainly in the lower tail. On one hand, variation in RSRP measurements increases when UE velocity is increased, but on the other hand the effect of measurement bandwidth is much smaller. Again high end values are almost top of each others, but on the lower tail the exists couple decibels difference between different measurement bandwidths. It should be noted that these results are from the simulation with 40 ms gap periodicity and ltering over consecutive measurement gaps is not used. It is expected that with ltering over consecutive

1 Spectral efficiency [Mbit/s/cell/MHz]

BW1 BW2 Full BW 30 km/h

120 km/h

1 gap

2 gaps Sliding window size

4 gaps

Fig. 3.

Spectral efciency with 40 ms gap periodicity.

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3 km/h BW1 BW2 Full BW

1 Spectral efficiency [Mbit/s/cell/MHz]

Number of handovers / call

BW1 BW2 Full BW 30 km/h

20 0 40 20 0 40 20 0

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120 km/h

120 km/h

1 gap

2 gaps Sliding window size

4 gaps

1 gap

2 gaps Sliding window size

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Fig. 4.

Spectral efciency with 120 ms gap periodicity.

Fig. 6.

Number of handovers / call with 120 ms gap periodicity.

In all of the simulated scenarios from low UE mobility to relatively high UE mobility the 6 PRB wide RSRP measurement bandwidth (BW1) generates recognizable increase in the number of handovers compared to the full RSRP measurement bandwidth (50 PRBs, 10 MHz) when no RSRP ltering over consecutive measurement gaps is performed. However, it may not be the best or even safe choice from the total system perspective to rely on handover decisions without any RSRP ltering over consecutive measurement gaps even if wider RSRP measurement bandwidth is used. In the low velocity scenario, lowest number of handovers can be observed with all measurement bandwidth options among the evaluated cases. If the number of handovers is desired to be kept very low, the RSRP ltering period needs to be increased from single gap to four gaps (in case of 40 ms gap interval) or to two gaps (in case of 120 ms gap interval). Based on the spectral efciency and user throughput distributions this has practically no impact to the performance. Therefore
3 km/h 40 20 Number of handovers / call 0 40 20 0 40 20 0 BW1 BW2 Full BW

30 km/h

120 km/h

introducing a slight additional delay to the handover triggering due to longer RSRP ltering period would seem feasible in order to keep the number of handovers at acceptable levels. Furthermore, as discussed later in this section, a bit longer RSRP ltering periods are needed for some other scenarios just for keeping the number of handovers reasonable. As it may be difcult to always know UE velocity, it is also often difcult to optimize RSRP lter lengths UE by UE. Some optimization e.g. in terms of Layer 3 ltering could of course be done based on the knowledge of a given deployment scenario like typical UE velocities within given area. In the medium velocity scenario it would already seem that at least RSRP ltering length of four measurement gaps is needed for all RSRP measurement bandwidths to limit the number of handovers. It would also seem that further increase in the RSRP ltering period could be benecial. However as it has not been evaluated it cannot be conrmed that it would not have any negative effect on other performance metrics (spectral efciency and user throughput), but nevertheless it would seem attractive to reduce the number of handovers further. In case of the high velocity scenario the number of handovers remains high without proper time domain RSRP ltering with all RSRP measurement bandwidths. The spectral efciency do not seem to suffer from the four gaps long RSRP ltering period compared to the shorter RSRP ltering lengths. It can also be noted that in all cases 120 ms gap interval results in lower number of handovers. This is best observed at single gap RSRP ltering period. As approximately same number of calls ends with both gap intervals, there exist lower number of possible events for handover evaluation with less frequent measurement. D. Number of measurement within one gap

1 gap

2 gaps Sliding window size

4 gaps

Fig. 5.

Number of handovers / call with 40 ms gap periodicity.

Considering 6 ms measurement gap it is possible to do more than one measurement within each gap and that way to try to improve the accuracy of RSRP measurement. In these simulations 6 ms measurement gaps are used with 40

40 ms gap interval SE [Mbit/s/cell/MHz]

40 ms gap interval Number of HOs/call 20 15 10 5 0 120 ms gap interval Number of HOs/call 20 15 10 5 0 1 gap 2 gaps Sliding window size 4 gaps 1 Sample/gap 3 Samples/gap

1.5 1 0.5 0 120 ms gap interval

1 Sample/gap 3 Samples/gap

SE [Mbit/s/cell/MHz]

1.5 1 0.5 0

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Fig. 7. Spectral efciency with 40 ms and 120 ms gap periodicity and 1 or 3 samples / measurement gap.

Fig. 8. Number of handovers / call with 40 ms and 120 ms gap periodicity and 1 or 3 samples / measurement gap.

ms and 120 ms periodicity and UE velocity is set to 30 km/h. Number of measurements within one gap is varied with one and three. Fig. 7 presents comparison in terms of spectral efciency and Fig. 8 in terms of number of handovers. Spectral efciency remains unchanged between different measurement congurations, which is in line with previous results presented in Figs. 3 and 4 where UE velocity is found to be more dominating factor. However, number of handovers can be clearly reduced by taking three samples within one measurement gap. Without ltering over consecutive measurement gaps amount of handovers is almost halved, but when ltering is done over four measurement gaps difference between one or three samples within one measurement gap is almost diminished especially with 120 ms gap periodicity. It should be noted that with lower UE velocity than 30 km/h channel conditions are not changing that fast thereby reducing the accuracy improvement of multiple measurement samples within one measurement gap. On the other handover effect is expected to be slightly bigger with higher UE velocities. V. C ONCLUSIONS In this paper we have analyzed potential performance benets that wider RSRP measurement bandwidth could provide in inter-frequency handover evaluation using measurement gap based inter-frequency RSRP measurements for wider E-UTRA bandwidth options. These studies were done using dynamic system simulations and we have concentrated on evaluating performance differences between different RSRP measurement bandwidths in handover evaluation as inter-frequency cell identication is anyway done in all cases using 6 middle PRBs. Thus, cell identication performance would not be dependent on RSRP measurement bandwidth. Spectral efciency and number of handovers were evaluated performance metrics in these simulations. From the evaluated metrics, different RSRP measurement bandwidths resulted notable difference only in number of handovers. This is emphasized by the selected parameters (no Layer

3 ltering or time-to-trigger). When no RSRP ltering over consecutive measurement gaps was performed recognizable increase in number of handovers was observed with 6 PRB wide measurement compared to the full bandwidth (50 PRBs, 10 MHz) measurement. However, it may not be the best or even safe choice from the total system perspective to rely on handover decisions without any RSRP ltering over consecutive measurement gaps even in case of the widest RSRP measurement bandwidth. The observed number of handovers seems undesirably high even with the widest measurement bandwidths if no ltering over the consecutive measurement gaps is considered. No negative impacts were observed in other evaluated metrics from the prolonged handover execution. It should be noted that these results do not include the impact of the measurement gaps to the data reception, but it is not expected that the slightly limited scheduling freedom due to gaps would cause any major degradation to the achieved user throughput with practical trafc models, especially in the case of longer gap interval. R EFERENCES
[1] Physical Layer Aspects for Evolved UTRA, 3GPP Technical Report 25.814, version 7.1.0, September 2006. [2] A. Toskala, H. Holma, K. Pajukoski, and E. Tiirola, UTRAN Long Term Evolution in 3GPP, in Proceedings of IEEE Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications Conference (PIMRC06), September 2006. [3] Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical layer; Measurements, 3GPP Technical Specication 36.214, version 8.0.0, September 2007. [4] Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical channels and modulation, 3GPP Technical Specication 36.211, version 8.0.0, September 2007. [5] S. Hamalainen, T. Henttonen, J. Numminen, and J. Vikstedt, Network effects of WCDMA compressed mode, in IEEE Semiannual Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC 2003-Spring), April 2003. [6] P. Kela, J. Puttonen, N. Kolehmainen, T. Ristaniemi, T. Henttonen, and M. Moisio, Dynamic Packet Scheduling Performance in UTRA Long Term Evolution Downlink, in IEEE Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing (ISWPC08), May 2008.