Load Balancing Effect of Inter-Frequency Handover with Pilot Power Tuning in UTRAN

Tsuyoshi KASHIMA, Houtao ZHU

Nokia Research Center Tokyo, Japan Tsuyoshi.Kashima@nokia.com, Houtao.Zhu@nokia.com
AbstractLoad balancing is an important technique in radio resource managements (RRM). In future, when several frequencies are required to cover increasing number of users and increasing amount of traffic, inter-frequency handover (IFHO) will perform an important role in load balancing between frequencies. Meanwhile, there is usually geographical load imbalance in real network and changing coverage by tuning common pilot channel (CPICH) power can mitigate this geographical load imbalance. In this context, we evaluated the RRM techniques combining IFHO and CPICH power tuning for balancing load and for achieving better performance by using a dynamic WCDMA simulator. First, we compare the IFHO performances in terms of the IFHO trigger types. In this comparison, we will show the CPICH EcNo (code energy divided by noise energy)-triggered IFHO can achieve 30-40 % downlink (DL) load decreases in hotspot area. Next, we analyze the relation between the IFHO and CPICH power tuning, by comparing the effect of CPICH power tuning with and without IFHO function and show its performance by using the simulator. Then finally, we will propose an example procedure to utilize the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning based on the revealed relation between them. Keywords: WCDMA, Inter-frequency handover, CPICH power tuning, Pilot power tuning, Radio resource management, Load balancing, Dynamic simulator

in soft handover (SHO) case and in IFHO case. In SHO, a paper [6] concludes that CPICH EcNo achieves better performance in outage probability and call blocking probability. A paper [7] studies IFHO in hierarchical-cell-structuredWCDMA network and concludes that RSCP outperforms EcNo in call dropping probability and blocking probability. B. CPICH power tuning CPICH power tuning has been investigated as one of the techniques to control the cell coverage and to achieve the load balancing [1][2]. By reducing the CPICH power, the operator can reduce the cell coverage and cell load. In addition to that, the reduction of CPICH power directly leads to the decrease of DL load. According to [4], the adjustment of CPICH power can improve the network stability and call quality by reducing the BTS power. Generally speaking, the impact of CPICH power tuning is broad. For example, when reducing CPICH power, the problem of coverage hole needs to be considered. Then the paper [3] uses cost functions to evaluate the whole performance. II. ANALYTICAL APPROACH

I.

BACKGROUNDS

In this paper, the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning technique will be discussed. For that purpose, the backgrounds of IFHO function and CPICH power tuning are separately explained in this section. A. Inter-Frequency Handover One advantage of IFHO is the trunking gain, which can be obtained from the load balancing between different frequencies. One main disadvantage of IFHO is the compressed mode, in which UE abandons its transmission and reception periodically to measure another frequency. This mode reduces the performance of power control [5], and leads to the increase of interference. In terms of IFHO trigger, there are several choices, such as whether to use uplink (UL) trigger or downlink (DL) trigger, and whether to use code power or EcNo (code energy divided by noise energy). The comparison of CPICH EcNo and RSCP (Received Signal Code Power) has been already discussed both

Analytical approach can provide an idea about what is expected. It is possible to apply the following discussion to both UL and DL. Assume that there are two frequencies, freq1 and freq2 in the system. The definition of UL load UL and DL load DL in this paper are as follows:

UL = ( Interferenceown + Interferenceother ) Pr x total , DL = Ptx total Ptx max .

(1)

Those loads fluctuate due to fading, noise, mobility, traffic, system action, and other factors. In addition, if there are packet users, the fluctuation of the load becomes larger. Thus, loads need to be analyzed as statistical values. Assuming that freq1 and freq 2 are stochastic variables, freq1 and freq 2 are the mean values, freq1 and freq 2 are the standard deviation of the loads on freq1 and freq2. If there is no IFHO function or no load balancing between freq1 and freq2, those load distributions do not change. If there is IFHO function and, if the perfect load balancing effect is available, the stochastic variables are balanced to the same value as,

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 = ( freq1 + freq 2 ) 2 .

(2)

Then, the mean value and the standard deviation can be easily calculated as

= ( freq1 + freq 2 ) 2 ,
=
2 freq1

(3)
2. (4)

hotspot freq.2

+ freq 2

Thus, if the frequency 1 and frequency 2 originally have the same statistical distribution, in other words, if freq1 = freq 2 freq and freq1 = freq 2 freq , the above equation can be written as,

= freq ,
= freq 2.

(5)

freq.1

(6)
Figure 1. cell configuration and hotspot area

These equations indicate that thanks to the load balancing effect of IFHO, the fluctuation of the load can be suppressed. As a result, the system becomes more stable, and the probability that the system goes into the overload state becomes lower. Therefore the system can accommodate more users, and the capacity becomes more than double. This is called as a trunking gain. It can be concluded that the important thing to achieve a trunking gain is how perfect the load balancing is performed. From the above analysis, it becomes clear that IFHO can provide not only the trunking gain but also the stability of the load. Usually, when tuning CPICH power, too high interference and coverage hole need to be considered. If the load is more stable, the probability that the system goes into those bad conditions becomes lower. Then the range that the CPICH power can be changed becomes larger. From this consideration, at least, it is expected that using the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning can provide better load balancing ability than using only one of them. III. IFHO EVALUATION BY DYNAMIC SIMULATIONS

B. Simulation results Because CPICH power tuning has a direct impact on the DL IFHO triggers and our final target is developing a controllable combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning, DL IFHO triggers are more important than UL IFHO trigger in this research. Then, we compared the performances between CPICH RSCP and CPICH EcNo triggers. Note that in the following, the definition of IFHO rate used in figures is IFHO rate =number of IFHO / number of calls.

(7)

Figure 2 and Figure 3 show call success rate (CSR). In Figure 4 showing DL loads, Cell 0, 1, 2, 7, 8 and Cell 19, 20, 26, 27, 30 are in different frequencies and, Cell 7 and Cell 20 are two hotspot-closest cells. The threshold of IFHO trigger can control IFHO rate.
100 99 98 97 CSR [%] 96 95 94 U L , cp ich E cN o D L , cp ich E cN o U L , cp ich R S C P D L , cp ich R S C P

A. Simulation condition Different from the paper [7], we used the uniformly distributed two-layered macro cell configuration shown in Figure 1. Both frequencies have almost 100 % coverage by using two kinds of BTSs, which are 120-degree-separated 3sector BTS and at the same location 60-degree-rotated to each other. This is for fully utilizing the available frequencies and for simplifying evaluation. Terminals generate calls by randomly choosing either frequency 1 or frequency 2 with equal probabilities for each frequency. They move at 20 km/h and, in addition, there is a hotspot, at which user density is higher than other area. The other dynamic simulator settings are listed in table 1 in the last page of this paper. Our evaluations are done on ten sectors surrounding this hotspot, namely, sectors 0, 1, 2, 7, 8, 19, 20, 26, 27 and 30 in Figure 1.

93 92 91 0 0 .1 0 .2 0 .3 IFH O r a te 0 .4 0 .5

0 .6

Figure 2. speech CSR for DL IFHO triggers

10 0 98 96 CSR [%] 94 92 90 88 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 IF H O rate 0.4 0.5 0 .6 U L, c pic h E cN o D L, c pic h E cN o U L, c pic h R S C P D L, c pic h R S C P

In simulations, the negative effect of compressed mode is not included due to the limitation of the simulator. However, that effect will be evaluated manually in the analysis section of this paper using the values from the literature [8].

Figure 3. packet CSR for DL IFHO triggers

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0.8 Cell 0 0.7 DL loading 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 IFHO rate 0.4 0.5 0.6 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 7 Cell 8 Cell 19 Cell 20 Cell 26 Cell 27 Cell 30

compressed mode and the gain is still positive. In addition, because IFHO rate determines the negative effect of compressed mode and the type of IFHO triggers does not have any influences on that negative effect, our conclusion, that EcNo trigger is better, is still valid, even if the compressed mode is considered.
C. Difference between UL and DL performance As explained in the previous subsection, the DL performance is improved better than UL performance. In some cases, UL performance becomes worse in too high IFHO rate region. Even using UL IFHO triggers such as UL transmission power and UL quality, DL performance is also improved and UL performance has a peak at a certain IFHO rate. This different behavior of UL and DL performance can be explained from the behavior of UL load. Figure 5 shows the UL load for CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO case. The UL load increases if the IFHO rate is over 10 %. In CPICH EcNo-triggered IFHO case, the UL load is almost stable or slightly increases. One important lesson from those results is that even without the negative effect of compressed mode, too high IFHO rate could cause higher load and worse performance in UL.

Figure 4. DL load balancing effect of CPICH EcNo-triggered IFHO

The simulation results reveal that 1. CSR in Figure 2 and Figure 3, packet delay, and throughput (not shown) are better with higher IFHO. The different behavior between UL and DL is discussed in the next subsection. Both DL IFHO triggers improve the DL performance better than UL performance. One reason is that DL IFHO trigger is based on DL load imbalance and UL only receives an indirect benefit from this DLtriggered IFHO. Detail discussion is done in the next sub section. CPICH EcNo trigger achieves better performance than CPICH RSCP trigger. Figure 2 and Figure 3 show that difference of achievable performance. In addition, comparing to the load balancing effect of CPICH EcNo triggered IFHO in Figure 4, the load balancing effect of RSCP triggered IFHO is smaller. This is because EcNo includes the impact of interference in the trigger decision and RSCP does not. As an example, this difference can be seen also in the reaction to the hotspot, or load imbalance. In IFHO occurrence distribution map, although CPICH EcNo triggered IFHO is concentrated on hotspot area, CPICH RSCP triggered IFHO scattered indifferent to hotspot. CPICH EcNo trigger achieves 30-40 % DL load decrease as shown in Figure 4. The paper [7] concludes that CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO achieves better performance than CPICH EcNotriggered IFHO, which is opposite to our conclusion from these results. There are two main reasons for this difference. One reason is the difference of the performance indicator used for the evaluation. The paper [7] only mentions the call block and call drop, although in our simulation cases, call blocks and call drops are almost zero because the coverage is almost 100 % and load is not too high. Then, we used other indicators, such as load, CSR, throughput, and packet delay. The other reason is the difference of the cell configuration. They used hierarchical structure and our simulations use uniformly-distributed cell structure.

2.

3.

Next, we explain the increase of UL load shown in Figure 5. Generally speaking, handovers done at improper timing are located far from the middle point between two BTSs (base transceiver stations), in other words handover is done too early or too late when mobiles move. This kind of improper timing handover causes higher UL interference to the closer BTSs because the UE (user equipment) is connected to the farther BTS. If the IFHO threshold is too loose and IFHO rate is too high, many improper timing handovers would occur. This can cause the UL load increase and worsen the UL performance. This discussion can be also applied to DL. However, because generally UL suffers from interference more than DL in CDMA network, UL load increase is more serious in the results. IV. IFHO AND CPICH POWER TUNING

4.

A. Simulation condition To evaluate the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning in load balancing, we choose CPICH EcNo trigger. One reason for this choice is that CPICH EcNo trigger proves to be a better trigger in the performance analysis done in section II. The other reason is that CPICH EcNo trigger has better load balancing ability. This can be seen in the results that CPICH EcNo triggered-IFHO occurrence is concentrated on hotspot.
0.9 0.85 0.8 UL loading 0.75 0.7 0.65 0.6 0.55 0.5 0.45 0.4 0 0.1 0.2 IFHO rate 0.3 0.4 0.5 Cell 0 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 7 Cell 8 Cell 19 Cell 20 Cell 26 Cell 27 Cell 30

According to the literature [8], the negative effect of compressed mode can be estimated to be roughly 20 % if all users are in compressed mode and 2 % if a tenth of users are in compressed mode. Therefore, we can conclude that 30-40 % gain in DL capacity is larger than the negative effect of

Figure 5. UL load balancing effect of CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO

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0.8

DL loading / (7 20)/ no IFHO

0.8 0.7
DL loading

Cell 0 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 7 Cell 8 Cell 19 Cell 20 Cell 26 Cell 27 Cell 30

0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1 1.5 2 2.5 3

0.6 IFHO rate 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1 1.5 2 Pilot power of Cell 7 and 20 [W] 2.5 3

Pilot pow e r of Ce ll 7 a nd 20 [W ]

Figure 6. The impact of CPICH power on IFHO rate

Figure 8. CPICH power impact on DL load without IFHO

Generally speaking, the purpose of CPICH tuning is to mitigate the load imbalance, such as the situation occurring in hotspot area, by changing the coverage of each sector defined by CPICH power. Then in this simulation experiment, we changed the CPICH power of two hotspot-closest sectors, which are sector 7 and sector 20 in Figure 1, from 1 W to 3 W keeping both CPICH powers to be the same. Other simulation settings are the same as explained in subsection II-A. As shown in Figure 6, CPICH power tuning has a large impact on IFHO rate triggered by EcNo. This is because by decreasing the CPICH power and reducing coverage of hotspot-closest sectors, other sectors than sector 7 and sector 20 need to cover the hotspot. This situation causes more IFHO around hotspot area. This CPICH power tuning simulation is done with very low IFHO threshold, namely with very high IFHO rate. The rightmost point in Figure 4 corresponds to 2 W in Figure 6.
B. Comparison between with IFHO and without IFHO To clarify the effect of IFHO on the performance of CPICH power tuning, we first show the DL load behavior caused by the change of CPICH power with and without IFHO function. Figure 7 shows the result with IFHO and Figure 8 shows the result without IFHO. The comparison of those results suggests that the CPICH power tuning with IFHO has better load balancing ability than without IFHO. This results can be explained as follows. Without IFHO, when decreasing CPICH power, other cells, which need to cover that hotspot area, should be of the same frequency. With IFHO, covering cells can be of any frequencies. Then this means that the distance between hotspot and these alternative cells covering the hotspot is larger without IFHO than with IFHO. Then, without IFHO, the transmission powers in UL and DL are larger, causing the increase of loads.
0.7 0.6 0.5 DL loading 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 Pilot power of Cell 7 and 20 [W] Cell 0 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 7 Cell 8 Cell 19 Cell 20 Cell 26 Cell 27 Cell 30

Another thing to be mentioned about Figure 7 and Figure 8 is that the DL loads of frequency 1 and frequency 2 are almost the same when IFHO function is active but the DL loads of frequency 2 is higher than that of frequency 1 when the IFHO function is not active. Although there in no clear reason about which frequency should have higher load, this difference is, at least, because of the load balancing effect of IFHO function. Without IFHO function, the load difference between frequency 1 and frequency 2 is mainly determined at the call initiation phase and then call blocks have an effect on this load difference. In addition, call blocks are also affected by the load situation. In this sense, the system load behavior without IFHO function is more complicated than that with IFHO load balancing effect. In other words, if IFHO function is used, its load balancing effect makes the system load behavior simpler, and makes the CPICH power tuning easier and more effective.
C. Analysis on CPICH power tuning with IFHO The comparison between with IFHO and without IFHO shows that the CPICH power tuning is easier and more effective with IFHO than without IFHO. Then hereafter, the analysis is done only for the CPICH power tuning with IFHO function. In Figure 7, the DL load of hotspot-closest cells can be decreased to the same level as the load of other cells by reducing their CPICH power to 1 W. This load decrease is very clear and the rule to achieve this load balancing from CPICH power tuning is very simple. Another important thing is that along with this DL load balancing, CSR, packet delay and throughput are also improved and UL load does not increase. Later in conclusion, we propose an example procedure to achieve this load balancing by IFHO and CPICH power tuning.

Figure 9 shows the UL load behavior, which does not have any clear tendency and is almost stable. Even without IFHO, the UL load behaves in almost the same way. In this sense, performance analysis should be on DL.
0.8 0.75 0.7 0.65 UL loading 0.6 0.55 0.5 0.45 0.4 0.35 0.3 1 1.5 2 2 .5 3 P ilo t p o w e r o f Ce ll 7 a n d 20 [W ]

U L lo a d in g / (7 =2 0 )/ c p ic h E c N o 12
Cell 0 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 7 Cell 8 Cell 19 Cell 20 Cell 26 Cell 27 Cell 30

Figure 7. CPICH power impact on DL load with IFHO

Figure 9. CPICH power impact on UL load with IFHO

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100 98 96 CSR [%] 94 92 90 88 86 1 1 .5 2 2 .5 3 P ilo t P o w e r o f C e ll 7 a n d C e ll 2 0 [ W ] UL P a c k e t C S R D L Packet C SR UL S p e e c h C S R D L Speech C SR

TABLE I.

DYNAMIC SIMULATOR SETTING

Cell environment Multi path model Fast fading Slow fading Code orthogonality Propagation model Load target CPICH power BTS max power Terminal velocity Number of terminals Proportion of traffic FER target

18 macro cells (frequency 1) 23 macro cells (frequnecy 2) Vehicular A Jakes model Log normal distribution with 8 dB std.dev. Site correlation = 0.5, sector correlation = 0.8 Correlation distance = 50 m 0.5 Okumura-Hata model UL target: noise rise = 4 dB DL target: transmission power = 10 W 2 W, (1-3 W in CPICH tuning) 20 W 20 km/h 10000 UEs including active and inactive 70 % speech (12.2 kbps) and 30 % packet (8, 12, 16, 32, 64, 144 kbps) 1 % for speech and 10 % for packet ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Figure 10. CPICH power impact on CSR with IFHO

In Figure 7, another topic needs to be analyzed. The loads of hotspot-closest cells have a peak at CPICH power = 2.5 W. The behavior of CSR shown in Figure 10 can explain this DL load behavior. An important result from this figure is that the DL speech CSR decreases dramatically at the CPICH power of 3W. The increases of CPICH power leads to the increase of coverage and load. The higher load triggers admission control (AC) actions more and leads to lower CSR and lower load. But due to the larger coverage, the number of packet users increases, which leads to the larger load fluctuation. Therefore the number of AC actions is still high although the average load becomes lower. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we reported the benefit of a combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning. Analytical approach reveals that IFHO can stabilize the load fluctuation and helps the CPICH power tuning. Using a dynamic simulator, a comparison of IFHO trigger types is done first. The results indicate that CPICH EcNo is better than CPICH RSCP for balancing load in the uniformly overlapped multi-frequency WCDMA network. CPICH EcNo achieves 30-40 % DL load decrease of the hotspot-closest cells. Although compressed mode could make a certain amount of loss, according to the literature, the loss is less than 20 % capacity loss, which is less that the gain we obtained above. Next, we did simulations on the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning. CPICH power tuning can almost perfectly remove the load imbalance at DL left by IFHO, while CPICH power tuning without IFHO cannot achieve any load balance by simple CPICH power tuning. Other performance indicators do not become worse in the tuning of CPICH power with IFHO. Therefore, we concluded that their combination is useful for DL load balancing. An example of simple optimization procedure is as follow: First turn on IFHO to stabilize the load fluctuation and help the CPICH tuning. Next, tune CPICH power to the optimum. Then, tune IFHO threshold considering the balance of trunking gain and the negative effect of compressed mode. There are reasons for this procedure. Because CPICH power has a large impact on IFHO rate, it needs to be tuned first. But without IFHO, CPICH tuning shows totally different performance, CPICH tuning needs to be done with IFHO. The quantitative evaluation of the compressed mode needs to be done in future work.

This work is supported by Nokia Research Center. The authors would like to thank Rin Nagaike, Dr. Sivakumar and the developers of WCDMA dynamic simulator. REFERENCES
[1] Dongwoo Kim., et al, Pilot Power Control and Service Coverage Support in CDMA Mobild Systems, in proceedings of the 49th IEEE VTC. Pp. 1464-1468, 1999. Valkealahti K, et al, WCDMA common pilot power control for load and coverage balancing, Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, the 13th IEEE, pp 1412-1416, 2002 Valkealahti K, et al, WCDMA common pilot power control with cost function minimization, Proceedings of the 56th IEEE VTC pp 22442247, 2002 Houtao Zhu et at. Load balancing in WCDMA systems by adjusting pilot power Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications, IEEE The 5th international Sym. Vol. 3, pp 936-940, 2002 Maria Custafsson et al. Compressed Mode Techniques for InterFrequency Measurements in a Wide-band DS-CDMA System IEEE pp231-235, 1997 X Yang, et al. Performance of Power-Triggered and Ec/No-Triggered Soft Handover Algorithms for UTRA, 3G Mobile Com, IEEE 2001 Wang Ying et al. Performance of RSCP-Triggered and Ec/NoTriggered Inter-Frequency Handover Criteria for UTRA, IEEE 2002 Radio Network Planning and Optimization for UMTS book, WILEY

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