Professional Documents
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Introduction
Long Term Evolution (LTE)
LTE(Flat Architecture)
Handover
Inter GW Load Balancing Approach
Inter GW Load Balancing Protocol
Hybrid Handover In Inter GW Load Balancing
Analysis and Result
Conclusion
Mobile Operator Challenges
Convergence of Wireless technologies
Global Partnership
Introduction
The report explores key parameters and success factors, the level of readiness
of the industry, and provides recommendations for successful LTE deployment
Introduction (cont..)
The ever-increasing demands, such as the users expect to enjoy the service
anywhere, anytime and the networks support a seamless mobility, driving the
evolution of mobile networks at a fast pace.
Rather than four nodes in the user plane (NodeB, RNC, SGSN,
GGSN), the flat network architecture will comprise a far simpler
configuration of just eNodeB (enhanced Node B) and the Access
Gateway (AGW) .
UMTS/GPRS vs LTE(Flat Architecture)
MSC(Server)
MME / S-GW MME / S-GW
RNC
SGSN
S1 S1
GGSN
S1 S1
BSC
CN
X2 X2
eNodeB
2
LTE(Flat Architecture) cont…
Most of the functions and protocols implemented in 3G RNC are moved into
eNodeB.
AGW has been decomposed into Mobility Management Entity (MME) and
User Plane Entity . The MME is a control-signaling only entity. Its main
function is to manage the UE’s mobility.
User Plane Entity includes both serving and PDN (packet data network)
gateway functionality.
The connection between eNodeBs and AGWs is not anymore many to one
mapping, but many to many, i.e., one eNodeB can be associated with more
than one AGWs.
Handover
Handover is one of the major topics in mobile networks.
Radio Handover
The Radio Handover performs when both of the source and the
target BS (Base station) belong to the same network domain, i.e., the
involved BS are controlled by the same gateway or pool of
gateways.
One typical scenario is when UE moves from its current BS to its target BS
which is not controlled by the same GW or not located in the same GW pool area.
The third also a special situation is when load balancing is required. In this case,
although both of the source and target BS belong to the same pool of gateways, the
GW entity needs to be changed due to its capacity limitations. Note, handover for
latter scenario is not triggered due to UE mobility.
Independency of above introduced handover types is guaranteed by the Pool of
Gateway concept . It groups a number of gateways into a pool and will share the
resources of the pool of base stations which they are connected to.
It provides also redundancy, in case of a GW overload or failure, where the users
can be handed over to any other GW in the pool . The organization of Gateways
into different pools can be fruitfully applied in LTE/SAE. .
Pool Area Of Gateways
Inter Gateway Load Control Approach
If the packet arriving rate at the gateway is higher than the gateway’s service rate,
the queue length increases. Therefore, response time increases as well or in case of
exceeding the maximum queue length packets are even dropped. Hence, the
quality of service (QOS) level decreases.
As we know, there exist many ways to avoid a decreasing of the QoS level, such
as dropping some of the associated users . However, these ways are not always
desirable.
In this section inter-GW load balancing protocol will be proposed. The normal
L3 handover is trigged by the moving UE e.g. by signal strength measurements.
However, the inter-GW handover for load balancing is trigged by load state of a
gateway, particularly when the gateway is overloaded or aware of unbearable
delay.
In the gateway pool, the gateways could periodically exchange their load
information with each other (active). So each gateway knows the load condition of
its neighbours, and it knows potential target gateways (less loaded neighbouring
gateways).
It can also be notified by a control plan gateway (CP_GW), which knows all
GW’s load information, i.e. centralized.
When one gateway experiences significant load increase that approaches its
buffering limit, it could query its less loaded neighbours, to know if they could
accept gateway handovers for some UEs.
Inter-GW Load Balancing Flow Model
Inter Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (cont..)
The selection of UEs for gateway handover depends on the specific gateway
policy. If the minimization of QoS degradation is preferred, the gateway could
select those UEs with only elastic traffic for the gateway handover.
No matter what policy it is, the gateway should jointly consider the UEs' QoS
requirement and the current buffering status for the individual UEs.
Another special policy for the gateway is to consider UEs with ongoing radio
handover, i.e. the gateway handover and radio handover could be combined into
so-called hybrid handover.
Hybrid Handover In Inter GW Load Balancing
Since radio handover happens only with
cell-edge UEs that are usually of poor radio
propagation condition, plus it always
requires signalling between different BSs,
it unavoidably introduces additional delay
and possible packet loss for that UE.
In the case of hybrid handover, the associated gateway is not the one who
initiated the whole process as was in the case of gateway handover only.
Instead, upon the initiation of radio handover for that UE due to mobility, the
UE's serving BS should notify the associated gateway about the particular UE
that is going to perform radio handover.
If the associated gateway identifies a need to reduce its load, it could initiate the
inter-gateway handover process at the same time along with the radio handover
taken place at lower layer, with the same procedure as described for the gateway
handover.
In addition, the serving gateway (or the target gateway) must also notify the
target BS in the radio handover for an update of traffic routing.
Analysis Results
Figure : Average Throughput, delay and packet loss rate of the total network
Table : comparison between with and without load
balancing
Simulation time 0-50s 50-100s 100-150s