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This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts

for publication in the WCNC 2009 proceedings.

On Serving Cell Change Reliability in HSDPA


Network

Timo Nihtila , Kari Aho and Ilmari Repo


Magister Solutions Ltd., c/o Mattilanniemi 6-8, FIN-40100, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
E-mail: {Timo.Nihtila, Kari.Aho}@magister.fi
University of Jyvaskyla, P.O. Box 35, FIN-40014, Jyvaskyla, Finland
E-mail: Ilmari.Repo@jyu.fi

AbstractIn Wideband Code Division Multiple Access


(WCDMA) networks the Signaling Radio Bearer (SRB) is transmitted downlink to inform the user i.a. when it needs to make
a handover. When transmitting e.g. Voice over IP (VoIP) on
High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) SRB is mapped
on HSDPA user data channel, High-Speed Downlink Shared
Channel (HS-DSCH) in order to maximize voice capacity. The
lack of support for soft handover (SHO) of HS-DSCH may
compromise the reception of SRB and thus also a possible
incoming serving HSDPA cell change command especially at the
cell borders. This can lead to serious VoIP service degradation
due to prolonged camping on a poor cell and in the worst case
even to call dropping, if the cell change command is not received
before VoIP call drop criterion is met. This paper considers
the performance of SRB transmission on source cell HS-DSCH
during a handover process. Also a strategy of transmitting the
serving cell change command from the target cell is analyzed. The
study is done by the means of fully dynamic system simulations
and they consider both macro-cell and manhattan scenarios. The
results show that a relatively low SRB/handover error rate is
experienced in a macro cell scenario but in a more challenging
manhattan scenario the error rate is higher. Transmitting the
serving cell change command from the target cell HS-SCCH
results in similar handover failure rates in manhattan scenario
than using SRB on HS-DSCH in macro-cell scenario when static
power allocation for HS-SCCH is in use.

I. I NTRODUCTION
WCDMA is the most adopted air interface technology of the
third generation (3G) telecommunication networks. Since the
introduction of WCDMA in 1999, there has been a growing
interest of using a packet switched technology, e.g. Voice
over IP (VoIP), to transmit voice instead of using traditional
circuit switched Dedicated Channel (DCH) of WCDMA. The
high theoretical capacity due to high bandwidth efficiency
makes VoIP a tempting option to traditional circuit switched
techniques.
VoIP can be used with High Speed Downlink Packet Access
(HSDPA) technique, which was included in the 3rd Generation
Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 5 of the WCDMA specification. Fully packet switched HSDPA increased the spectral efficiency of the WCDMA downlink by using advanced
features e.g. dynamic packet scheduling, Hybrid Automatic
Repeat reQuest (HARQ) and Adaptive Modulation and Coding
(AMC). Unlike DCH, HSDPAs user data channel, High-Speed
Downlink Shared Channel (HS-DSCH), does not support soft
handover (SHO), in which the user entity (UE) is connected to

multiple cells. This makes it susceptible to channel degradation


especially at the cell border.
Signaling Radio Bearer (SRB) carries the Radio Resource
Control (RRC) related information of a WCDMA connection.
SRB is transmitted when UEs active set (AS) is updated, the
radio bearer is reconfigured or most importantly when a UE
needs to make a serving cell change. SRB can be made reliable
by transmitting it on DCH, since it can be soft combined from
multiple cells, i.e. both from the source (old) cell and from
the target (new) cell. However, there is a significant loss of
capacity caused by the code shortage of VoIP due to DCH
occupying part of the code space. Thus, to achieve high VoIP
capacity, SRB needs to be carried on HS-DSCH.
Due to the volatility of HS-DSCH especially at the cell
border the reception of SRB and an incoming serving cell
change command might be compromised. Due to the timecritical nature of voice, this can lead to serious VoIP service
degradation due to prolonged camping on a poor cell and in the
worst case even to call dropping, if the cell change command is
not received before VoIP call drop criterion is met. This might
happen e.g. in a manhattan scenario, where the cell strengths
can vary rapidly due to shadowing caused by the buildings.
There has been studies published in 3GPP and in academia
that indicate the need for improvement in cell change procedure with HSDPA. 3GPP has initiated a Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network (TSG RAN) work item on
the subject of HS-DSCH serving cell change reliability. In [1]
the authors found call drop probabilities unacceptably high
under urban canyon environments. The study considered
a single user driving through two cities. In [2] the authors
presented analysis of the impact of serving cell change to VoIP
service performance. However, the study does not address
HO failure probabilities. In [3] the impact of SRB error
probabilities was shown to be minor in a macro cell scenario.
However, the analysis considered separate simulations that
took system level simulation output as an input.
This paper takes a broader look to the subject by studying
the detection probability of SRB on HS-DSCH and thus
the handover success rate with a full network of users in
both macro and manhattan scenarios. The study is done by
the means of fully dynamic system simulations, in which
the mobility of users and the most essential radio resource
management functions, such as handover measurements and

978-1-4244-2948-6/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2009 proceedings.

signaling, are modeled in detail.


The paper is organized as follows. Section II presents
the modeling issues of the simulator and SRB transmission.
Section III presents the simulation scenarios and in section
IV the simulation results are discussed. Finally in section V
conclusions are drawn.
II. M ODELING ISSUES

Fig. 1.

Simulations are carried out by using a fully dynamic radio


network simulator presented for the first time in [4] and after
that used in various performance evaluations of WCDMA and
its enhancements, see e.g. [5], [6] and [7]. Latter includes
introduction to the simulators HSDPA functionality.
A. Handover event creation and triggering
During the simulation, every UE measures the Ec /I0 (difference between the strength of the signal and the noise floor)
of the pilots of their neighboring cells. The cells with the
strongest pilot signals are in the UEs active set. HSDPA
connection is always to one of the cells in the AS, which
is the serving HSDPA cell.
Event 1D (change of HSDPA serving cell) is created if the
following condition is met:
candidateEc I0 > servingEc I0 HOT hreshold

(1)

where candidateEc I0 is the Ec /I0 of the candidate cell


(currently in AS), servingEc I0 is the Ec /I0 of the serving
HSDPA cell and HOT hreshold is the HSDPA handover
(HO) threshold, a predefined network parameter. Event 1D
is triggered if condition (1) lasts for a time period of at least
time-to-trigger (TTT).
Event triggering in general means that the UE sends the
event to RNC and after that is ready to do the procedure
indicated by the event and is waiting for a confirmation
message from the RNC. This confirmation message is signaled
on the SRB. It is solely up to the network to decide whether
the UE is allowed to do the event procedure or not. If this
message is not received, the UE does not initiate the event
procedure, like change the HSDPA serving cell in the case of
event 1D.
B. Signaling Radio Bearer modeling
After the triggering, there is a delay before the handover
can be executed. The delay consists of uplink signaling, RNC
processing and SRB transmission delays. SRB is transmitted
after uplink signaling and RNC processing delays. We call the
time from this and before the handover an SRB period. The
SRB error rate is calculated during it in our simulations.
Fig. 1 presents the overall timing in the simulations of an
event 1D creation, triggering, SRB transmission and handover
execution using 100 ms time-to-trigger, 200 ms HO delay and
100 ms SRB period.
The SRB error rate calculation is done as follows. After a
certain delay from the moment UE triggered the event (100 ms
in our simulations), an SRB period is started for the UE. The
period lasts for 100 ms in our simulations. During the period

Timings of event creation, triggering and SRB transmission.

the scheduler prioritizes the UE over other UEs. A transport


block (TRB) created during this period is of size 325 bits
and is marked as an SRB TRB if fewer than 3 SRB TRBs
are already transmitted during this SRB period. Only 3 SRB
TRBs are sent during an SRB period in order to guarantee that
HARQ has time to finish all retransmissions of them within
the SRB period.
If the SRB transport block is received correctly in the first
or in one of the HARQ re-transmissions, an SRB success
counter is incremented. Naturally a correct reception of an
HS-DSCH requires correct decoding of the corresponding HSSCCH before it. Otherwise if all re-transmissions fail, SRB
error counter is incremented. In the end of the simulation, the
total SRB error rate can be calculated using these counters.
The SRB is sent normally on the source cell HS-DSCH. It
should be noted that in these SRB error rate simulations the
SRB does not affect the HO success. This means that the HO is
always executed despite the SRB success. This approach was
chosen because the main focus was in increasing knowledge
of the probability of SRB (and handover) failure of the first
cell change attempt. If the first handover attempt fails, the UE
is forced to camp in a poor cell and the degradation of service
is already happening.
Letting SRB affect the handover success rate would result in
more SRBs to be transmitted by users that are in bad channel
conditions (because they need more attempts to get the SRB
through than users that are in a good channel condition). This
would balance the SRB error rate distribution to worse and
therefore hinder the handover probability analysis severely.
Analysis of the actual impact of SRB failures to e.g. VoIP
capacity is out of the scope of this paper.
III. S IMULATION SCENARIO
A. Macro-cell scenario
Used macro scenario is presented in Fig. 2. It consists of 7
base station sites with 3 sectors each resulting in a layout of
21 hexagonal cells with a theoretical cell size of 933 meters
and an inter-site distance of 2800 meters. The scenario a so
called wrap-around scenario, where the UE mobility is limited
around the center cells, but the cell transmissions are replicated
outside the mobility area to offer more realistic interference
situation for every UE in the network. A UE is able to make a
handover to the outer cells but if it moves outside the mobility
area, its position is moved to the opposite side of the mobility
area.

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2009 proceedings.

simulations but only the highest (and the best performing)


power allocation was used in manhattan simulations, as the
performance in urban canyon-type scenario was supposedly
a lot worse than in a macro scenario. Also shorter Ec /I0
filter lengths and time-to-trigger values were taken into use
in manhattan simulations to enable faster reaction to rapidly
changing situations. Guard period parameter presented in the
table is the time period after the handover during which the
UE can not trigger a new serving cell change event.
TABLE I
S IMULATION PARAMETERS .

Fig. 2.

Wrap-around macro-cell scenario.

Manhattan scenario, presented in Fig. 3, consists of 132


buildings and 72 Node Bs distributed in the streets between
them. UEs move along the streets and when entering street
crossings they either turn or continue straight. The scenario
is depicted in Figure 2. In attempt to avoid border effects
the SRB message statistics were gathered only if the UE was
making an HSDPA handover between two of the 42 central
BTSs. Propagation model was based on UMTS 30.03 path loss
model for pedestrian test environment [8].

Parameter
Simulation time
No of users
Call arrival rate
[calls/s/user]
Slow fading distribution
Slow fading spatial
correlation
Building dimensions
Street width
Channel profile
Path powers [dB]
Path delays [chips]
UE velocity
Node B antenna type
Max Node B Tx power
Pilot power
HS-DSCH power
HS-SCCH power
Ec /I0 filter length
Time-to-trigger
HSDPA handover delay
SRB period length
SRB transport block size
Max no of sent
SRBs per SRB period
addW indow
addT imer
Max. active set size
HSDPA HO threshold
Guard period

Macro
1500

Manhattan
360 s
2500
0.005
log-normal, std 8 dB

50 m

5m

VehA

200(l)x200(w)x100(h) m
25 m
PedA
VehA: [-3.1, -5.0, -10.4,
-13.4, -13.9, -20.4]
PedA: [-0.2, -13.0]
VehA: [0, 1, 3, 4, 7, 10]
PedA: [0, 1]
30 km/h
3-sector
Omni
20 W
15 W
2W
[8,7,6,5] W
8W
Power controlled, max 2W
500 ms
[200, 400] ms
100 ms
[0, 100] ms
200 ms
100 ms
325 bits
3
1.5 dB
100 ms
3
2.0 dB
500 ms

IV. S IMULATION RESULTS


In this section simulation results are presented and discussed. First, the performance of transmitting the handover
command by SRB from the source (old) cell HS-DSCH is
considered. After that the results and analysis of sending handover command on target (new) cell HS-SCCH is presented.

Fig. 3.

Manhattan scenario.

The most essential simulation parameters are presented in


Table I. Four different HS-DSCH powers were used in macro

A. SRB on source cell HS-DSCH


Macro cell scenario results are gathered to Table II. The
SRB error rate for event 1D is presented with different HSDSCH transmit powers. It can be seen that with reasonable
power setting the SRB error rates stay at a relatively low level.
Thus it could be concluded that the SRB transmission on HSDSCH is not a problem in macro cell scenario, where the
changes in cell strengths are relatively slow and moderate in
magnitude.

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2009 proceedings.

TABLE II
SRB ERROR RATE RESULTS , MACRO SCENARIO .
HS-DSCH power
8W
7W
6W
5W

SRB error rate


0.4 %
0.5 %
1.0 %
1.4 %

TABLE III
SRB ERROR RATE RESULTS , MANHATTAN SCENARIO .
Ec /I0 filter length
200 ms
200 ms
400 ms
400 ms

TTT
0 ms
100 ms
0 ms
100 ms

SRB error rate


1.7 %
1.6 %
2.8 %
2.2 %

Results from manhattan scenario are presented in Table III.


HS-DSCH power was static 8 W as it performed best in macro
cell scenario. Different Ec /I0 filtering period lengths were
used and also different time to trigger values. In manhattan the
SRB error rates are expectedly higher than in macro scenario.
Around 1.5 % error rate can be achieved using short Ec /I0
filter length. With longer Ec /I0 filter lengths the cell signal
strengths are averaged over a longer period of time and thus the
reaction to changes in cell Ec /I0 s is slower than with shorter
filter length. The error rate seems to depend on this reaction
time very strongly. The time-to-trigger value also affects this
reaction time but in fact with shorter TTT value the error rate
is slightly higher than with higher value. The reason for this
might be that it is beneficial to have a certain observation
period after a candidate cell Ec /I0 becomes stronger than
the current serving cell signal so that too hasty handovers are
avoided.

Fig. 4.
Residual error rate of power controlled HS-SCCH with 2 W
max power, different number of re-transmissions (n) and different intertransmission intervals.

The error rates in Fig. 4 are all in all surprisingly high.


There seems to be an error floor which cannot be passed by
increasing the number of repetitions and time interval between
consecutive transmissions. The reason for this might be that
during the statistics collection the connection has just started
in the new cell and HS-SCCH power control does not have
had time to adapt to the new channel conditions.

B. Handover command on target cell HS-SCCH


Receiving HS-SCCH from the target cell during cell change
was proposed in [9]. In the proposition the cell change
command would not be sent anymore by SRB on the source
cell HS-DSCH. Instead, UE would monitor both the source
the target cell HS-SCCH after event 1D triggering. Should the
UE be scheduled in the target cell, this would act as an OK
to change to the target cell.
In the simulations the residual target cell HS-SCCH error
rate of n transmissions with m TTI intervals was monitored during the SRB period, where n=[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and
m=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Increasing the time interval between transmissions should supposedly increase time diversity
and lower the error rate. Only manhattan scenario was considered, as it was the problem scenario in earlier simulations. In
these simulations Ec /I0 filter length was set to 200 ms and
TTT was 100 ms.
Fig. 4 presents the results with power controlled HS-SCCH.
Single HS-SCCH transmission from the target cell has quite
high an error rate of around 4.5 % but by adding only one other
transmission the error rate is more than halved. By having 7
or more TTIs between the two transmissions, the error rate
drops to 1 %.

Fig. 5. Residual error rate of HS-SCCH with static 2.5 W power, different
number of re-transmissions (n) and different inter-transmission intervals.

Fig. 5 presents the results of HS-SCCH with static 2.5 W


power. A high power allocation was selected to see whether
power limitation causes the error floor that is seen in Fig. 4.
The error rates certainly decrease as high static power allocation is used. With all transmission strategies the error rate is
below 0.5 % thus the same level as with SRB on HS-DSCH
in macro-cell scenario is reached.
Interestingly, increasing the number of repetitions and the
interval between transmissions does not decrease the error rate

This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the WCNC 2009 proceedings.

basically at all. This indicates that there is an error floor for


HS-SCCH in manhattan scenario, which is caused by other
factors than insufficient HS-SCCH power. One possible reason
for the error floor is the nature of manhattan scenario where
shadowing of the buildings cause inevitable and fast channel
degradations.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper the performance of SRB transmission on
source cell HS-DSCH during a handover process was considered. SRB failure results in handover failure and prolonged
camping in a poor cell. This means degraded performance or
even call dropping to time-critical data services such as VoIP.
It was noticed that the SRB transmission on source cell HSDSCH results in relatively low SRB error rate, which basically
corresponds to handover failure rate. In a more challenging
manhattan scenario the error rates were higher. Also the
strategy of transmitting the serving cell change command by
the target cell HS-SCCH during the handover was analyzed
in manhattan scenario. Power controlled HS-SCCH resulted in
fairly high handover failure rate and this was possibly because
target cell HS-SCCH power control was not yet adapted to the
correct power setting. Static 2.5 W power allocation for HSSCCH resulted in similar handover failure rates than using
SRB on HS-DSCH in macro-cell scenario. However, an error
floor still remained which is most probably due to the nature
of manhattan scenario where shadowing of the buildings cause
inevitable and fast channel degradations.

VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank colleagues from Nokia and
Nokia Siemens Networks for their comments and support with
the simulator.
R EFERENCES
[1] Qualcomm, HS-DSCH serving cell change performance in urban canyon
environments, 3GPP TSG-RAN WG2 #60-bis contribution R2-080371,
January 2008.
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for Voice over IP, in Proceedings of the 65th IEEE Vehicular Technology
Conference (VTC2007-Spring), Dublin, Ireland, April 2007.
anen, K. Aho, and T. Ristaniemi, Performance of
[3] P. Lunden, J. Aij
VoIP over HSDPA in mobility scenarios, in Proceedings of the 67th
IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2008-Spring), Singapore,
May 2008.
[4] S. Hamalainen, H. Holma, and K. Sipila, Advanced WCDMA radio
network simulator, in Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium
on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Osaka,
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[5] S. Hamalainen, WCDMA radio network performance, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Jyvaskyla, 2003.
[6] J. Kurjenniemi, A study of TD-CDMA and WCDMA radio network
enhancements, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Jyvaskyla, 2005.
[7] T. Nihtila, Performance of advanced transmission and reception algorithms for high speed downlink packet access, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Jyvaskyla, 2008.
[8] 3GPP, Selection procedures for the choice of radio transmission technologies of the UMTS, 3GPP Technical Report TR 30.03U (V3.2.0),
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[9] Qualcomm, Improving reliability of HS-PDSCH serving cell change procedure, 3GPP TSG-RAN WG1 #52 contribution R1-080815, February
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