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Rev. A 08/12
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VoLTE Deployment and the Radio Access Network
The LTE User Equipment Perspective
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Dedicated Bearers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Semi-Persistent Scheduling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Discontinuous Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
INTRODUCTION
One promise of Long Term Evolution (LTE)
is the availability of a relatively flat, all-IP corresponding literature
access technology that provides a bandwidth-
WHITE PAPER
efficient method of delivering multiple types
IMS Architecture:
of user traffic simultaneously. Indeed, the The LTE User
ability to deploy Voice over IP (VoIP) services Equipment Perspective
such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE), while also
allowing high-rate data transfers, is one of the Reference Guide
principal drivers for the evolution to LTE. IMS Procedures and Protocols:
The LTE User
In the context of deploying VoLTE, a lot of Equipment Perspective
emphasis has been placed on the realization
of an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and its Posters
associated Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in LTE and the Mobile Internet
a wireless environment. Undeniably, IMS and IMS/VoLTE Reference Guide
SIP are key to deploying VoIP services such as
VoLTE in LTE networks.
It is IMS that provides the interconnect and gateway functionalities that allow VoIP
devices to communicate with non-VoIP devices or even non-wireless devices. SIP
defines the signaling necessary for call establishment, tear-down, authentication,
registration and presence maintenance, as well as providing for supplementary services
like three-way calling and call waiting.
The UEs ability to establish and maintain connectivity with an IMS network,
including all of the registration, authentication, security and mobility associated
with this connectivity
The UEs conformance to SIP signaling protocol and SIP procedures/call flows,
including any number of extensions that may be used in different deployment
scenarios
However, to focus development and testing only on these two areas would overlook
the most significant goal of VoLTE: to delivery carrier-grade (or telco-grade) voice
services that are perceived by subscribers to be as good as, if not better than, legacy
circuit-switched voice services. This concept fundamentally differentiates VoLTE from
other VoIP services. Deploying IMS and SIP will provide VoIP service in an LTE network,
but VoLTE raises the bar to provide the carrier-grade voice service that is the vital
objective of LTE networks and operators.
Ensuring carrier-grade voice requires the marriage of IMS and SIP with a number of
LTE Radio Access Network (RAN) features. It is this combination of IMS, SIP and RAN
features that ultimately provides the carrier-grade VoLTE experience. The remainder
of this white paper will identify this set of RAN features and how each of these features
improves the quality of VoLTE service.
Dedicated Bearers
One might ask why any of the many existing VoIP clients could not be installed on an
LTE UE and used to provide carrier-grade voice services. The answer is competition for
resources. As we all know, over-the-air bandwidth is a finite and precious commodity,
even with the increased spectral efficiency offered by LTE. We also know that the
number of applications using IP data and the total amount of data bandwidth these
applications consume continues to grow at an exponential rate. Each of these
applications and their associated data must compete for that finite bandwidth.
One downside of the Default EPS Bearer is that there is no control over quality of
service. A best effort strategy is used to deliver all of the generic traffic between the
UE and the Internet PDN. When the finite resources of the network are overwhelmed,
data traffic queuing takes place, leading to unforeseeable latency or dropped packets.
This is obviously undesirable, or even unacceptable, for real-time applications such as a
voice call.
Dedicated Bearers
Benefit: Dedicated Bearers allow VoLTE audio traffic to be
separated from all other traffic and delivered with a
higher QoS level
To overcome the best effort delivery of all indistinguishable traffic over a single EPS
Default Bearer, LTE introduces the concept of an EPS Dedicated Bearer. A Dedicated
Bearer allows certain types of data traffic to be isolated from all other traffic (for
example, VoIP traffic from FTP file download). Each Dedicated Bearer (there can be
multiple Dedicated Bearers establishing virtual connections to one or more PDN-GWs)
is associated with a Traffic Flow Template (TFT). A TFT defines which traffic, based
on source/destination IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports, should be delivered on a
particular Dedicated Bearer. Typically for VoLTE, after SIP signaling is used to establish
a voice session and negotiate the session parameters (e.g. which audio codec, bit rate,
transport protocols and ports will be used for audio), an EPS Dedicated Bearer between
the UE and an IMS PDN-GW is established for the express purpose of transporting
encoded voice packets. Refer to Figure 1 for an example of the traffic usage of a Default
Bearer vs. a Dedicated Bearer.
Further, each Dedicated Bearer can have different service quality attributes specified.
In LTE, a combination of Resource Type (Guaranteed Bit Rate vs. Non-Guaranteed Bit
Rate), Packet Delay Budget (the maximum acceptable end-to-end delay between the
UE and the PDN-GW), Priority (which can be dropped when network resources become
scarce) and Packet Error Loss Rate (the maximum acceptable rate of IP packets that are
not successfully received by the PDCP layer) are used to define a set of QoS (Quality of
Service) Class Identifier (QCI) levels, refer to Table 1.
Packet Delay Budget Maximum acceptable end-to-end delay between the UE and the PDN-GW
Maximum acceptable rate of IP packets that are not successfully received by
Packet Error Loss Rate
the PDCP layer
Value assigned for scheduling when capacity is reached, with 1 being
Allocation Retention Priority
highest level
As other applications are deployed in the future, multiple dedicated bearers may be
used, each with a different QCI value. For example, a video telephony implementation
may choose to transport audio using a Dedicated Bearer with QCI=1 and place video on
a different Dedicated Bearer with QCI=2. This would indicate that both audio and video
should be prioritized over best effort traffic. It also indicates that audio traffic is more
important to deliver with lower latency (100ms packet delay budget vs. 150ms) while
video traffic is more sensitive to packet errors (10 -3 packet error loss rate vs. 10 -2).
Semi-Persistent Scheduling
As mentioned above, shared channels (PDSCH/PUSCH) are used at the physical
layer to transport the data carried by the logical bearers. Since these channels are
shared amongst all of the users on an eNodeB, there must be a way to allocate these
channels to avoid multiple users trying to simultaneously use the same resource. In
the frequency domain an LTE carrier is divided into a number of subcarriers (currently
anywhere from six to one hundred depending on the bandwidth of the LTE carrier). In
the time domain each subcarrier is grouped into 0.5ms time slots during which either
six or seven of OFDM symbols can be delivered, depending on whether the system is
using normal or extended cyclic prefixes (inter-symbol guard periods). See the 3GPPs
TS 36.211 document for details. This results in a time-frequency grid of subcarriers and
time slots (refer to Figure 2). A grouping of twelve subcarriers in one time slot duration
is known as a Resource Block (RB). An RB is
the minimum allocation of the LTE physical
layer resource that can be granted to a UE.
One potential downside of SPS could occur in situations where there is silence during a
VoLTE conversation. If the SPS grant is maintained during silent periods, physical layer
resources are wasted. That is why SPS is semi-persistent; when it makes sense, an
SPS grant can be cancelled. If the UE does not transmit audio packets over a number of
network-defined transmission opportunities, the uplink grant will implicitly expire. On
the downlink, the network has the option of using an RRC message to cancel the grant.
Thus the right balance can be struck between reducing control channel overhead and
maximizing efficiency in the use of shared data channels.
Semi-Persistent Scheduling
Benefit: SPS greatly reduces the overhead associated with
scheduling small and periodic VoLTE audio packets,
thus reducing processing overhead and providing
more bandwidth to accommodate additional users
To reduce the size of headers used to deliver VoLTE audio, Robust Header Compression
(RoHC) is employed. RoHC is used over the air interface to conserve the precious
bandwidth of the radio access network (refer to Figure 4.) RoHC takes advantages of
the redundancy of some headers in various protocol layers, as well as the redundancy
of information contained in the headers of subsequent packets in the same audio
stream, to greatly reduce the size of the header overhead. The 40 to 60 bytes of header
length can be reduced to as little as 3 to 4 bytes. With RoHC enabled, a VoLTE encoded
audio transmission using the Wideband-AMR codec is reduced from around 75 bytes to
around 35 bytes.
It should be noted that there are actually multiple usage profiles defined for RoHC:
The above example of VoLTE transmission compression ratios assumed the use of RoHC
Profile 1.
Discontinuous Reception
Packet-based voice services such as VoLTE encode periods of audio conversation
(VoLTE is typically 20ms periods) and then rapidly burst-transmit the encoded period of
audio to the receiver for decoding and playback over the 20ms period. When viewing
over-the-air transmissions, it is apparent that each encoded audio packet transmission
is followed by a period of no transmission.
Discontinuous Reception (DRX) takes advantage of these silent periods to turn off the
RF receiver of the UE, as well as other entities such as A/D converters and digital signal
processors associated with downlink demodulation. This reduces the drain on the
devices battery and increases talk and standby usage time. RRC messaging is used to
enable DRX and establish the UE receivers on/off pattern.
Given that the network established the DRX pattern, it will know when the UE is
monitoring the PDCCH and know when to schedule downlink data to the UE. Selection
of the DRX pattern must carefully be determined based on the latency requirements of
the application and the need to receive any possible retransmissions. Having too long
of a sleep period may lead to latency greater than the desired performance based on
the QCI value in use. Refer to Figure 5 for an illustration of a DRX pattern.
DRX can also operate in one of two different modes: Long DRX and Short DRX. Long
DRX has the UE receiver disabled for a longer period of time, and could be applicable
during periods of silence in the conversation when audio packets are sent less
frequently. However, when audio is consistently present, Short DRX can be used and a
cycle can be mapped to the periodic arrival of audio packets. Switching between Long
DRX and Short DRX is controlled by the eNodeBs MAC Layer and/or an activity timer at
the UE. Refer to Figure 6 for an illustration of Long and Short DRX.
Discontinuous Reception
Benefit: DRX helps save the UEs battery life during a VoLTE
call by allowing the UE to turn off its receiver in
between reception of audio packets
However, the short TTI does lead to uplink issues in select scenarios, most notably at
the edges of eNodeB coverage. When an eNodeB detects that a UE is at a cell edge
where reception is deteriorating and the UE cannot increase its transmit power, the
eNodeB can initiate TTI bundling via RRC messaging. In essence, this means the UE
will increase the error detection and correction associated with each data transmission
by transmitting over multiple TTIs (for example, bundling four consecutive TTIs). With
this enhanced error detection and correction, overall latency is less than when using a
single TTI.
Figure 7 shows how TTI bundling helps deliver lower-latency VoLTE data at cell edges,
where data errors are expected. Rather than wait for the HARQ process (normal HARQ
interlace period is 8ms) to ask for a retransmission of data with new error detection/
correction bits, TTI bundling assumes that data will need to be retransmitted. In
TTI bundling a number of data packets are pre-emptively packed into a single HARQ
interlace period. Each packet contains the same source data coded with 4 different sets
of error detection/correction bits. Also, HARQ retransmission adds HARQ ACK/NACK
overhead that TTI bundling does not.
In early deployments of LTE, there are two general approaches to handling scenarios
when the UE moves out of LTE coverage: single radio solutions such as Circuit-Switched
FallBack (CSFB) and dual radio solutions such as Simultaneous Voice-and-LTE (SVLTE).
With either interim approach, voice traffic is being handled by the legacy circuit-
switched networks and they are not, at the root, LTE solutions.
A second phase in LTE voice evolution introduces VoLTE and utilizes a single radio
solution that seamlessly maintains voice service as the UE moves in and out of areas
with LTE coverage. This involves completing a seamless handover from VoLTE to
legacy circuit-switched voice technology. Often referred to as Single Radio Voice Call
Continuity (SRVCC), this allows a UE, at the proper time and with the proper direction
from the network, to handover and retune from LTE to a legacy GSM or UMTS network
(or even a 1X network in the case of legacy 3GPP2) and simultaneously transition
the audio stream from VoLTE packet-switched delivery to GSM/UMTS (or 1X) circuit-
switched delivery. This provides for a cost-effective UE (a single radio design is used)
that can perform voice services in the most efficient manner (VoLTE when in LTE
coverage; circuit-switched otherwise) and deliver a positive user experience (calls are
maintained even when the UE moves out of LTE coverage). Refer to Figure 8 for an
illustration of a network topology supporting SRVCC.
This is not without complications, however. Implementation of SRVCC must take into
account that the network and the UE are trying to accomplish at least three non-trivial
tasks in near simultaneous fashion while minimizing any disruption to the real-time
voice call that is in progress:
The UE must retune to a new frequency (and most likely retune to a new band)
as it switches from LTE to the legacy network
Both the network and the UE must transition from delivering audio packets via a
packet-switched solution to a circuit-switched delivery
Dedicated Bearers:
At the end of the SIP negotiation to start a VoLTE call, the Evolved Packet Core (EPC)
of the network will initiate the Dedicated EPS Bearer Context Activation Procedure
to establish the bearer for the audio traffic. The UE must be able to complete this
procedure and use the Dedicated Bearer.
SPS:
RoHC:
DRx:
The UE must have ability to switch between long and short DRx in response to all the
relevant timers (as defined in TS 36.321).
TTI Bundling:
The UE must be able to transmit over multi TTI and receive, per TS 36.321. Note that
while many discussions of TTI bundling treat the bundle size as an arbitrary even
number, TS 36.321 defines TTI_BUNDLE_SIZE as 4.
SRVCC:
The UE must be able to complete the LTE to legacy network handover as well as change
its audio traffic from packet-switched to circuit-switched.
Summary
IMS and SIP are necessary technologies for deployment of VoIP in an LTE environment,
but it is ultimately the introduction of LTE RAN features that creates the differentiation
between VoLTE and VoIP. Specifically;
Dedicated Bearers allow for the prioritization of VoLTE audio packets over all
other best-effort traffic
While much focus has been placed in testing a UEs IMS connectivity and SIP signaling
conformance, ultimate success of carrier-grade VoLTE deployments will depend on fully
integrated testing of a UEs signaling along with the negotiation, establishment and
usage of the associated RAN features mentioned above.
This white paper is the third in a series of tools aimed to educate and support UE
developers as they contribute to the deployment of IMS/VoLTE. Please see Spirent
website (www.spirent.com) for other free white papers, recorded seminars, posters and
other resources that may be helpful to the UE developer.