Managing Control Plane Traffic and

Signaling Load in RNC

The RNC2600 ( Nokia RNC ) control plane model is more detailed model calculating the impact of different
control plane message’s impact on ICSU CPU load. The list of relevant signaling events having impact on
control plane load is shown below:

• Pagings per second in BH

• NAS signalling messages per second in BH (incl. SMSs, LAC, RAC updates, IMSI attaches/detaches,
SCC, SRNS relocations)
• Soft Handovers per second in BH
• CS call attempts per second in BH
• PS call attempts per second in BH (both, RT and NRT, Rel99 and HSDPA)
• DCH-FACH state transitions per second in BH
• HS-DSCH-FACH state transitions per second in BH
• FACH-PCH state transitions per second in BH
• Dedicated NBAP measurements per second in BH

The PS call attempts and state transitions as well as dedicated NBAP measurements are heavily increased in
smart phone intensive network. It is possible to make a model of the ICSU load to know what is events are
loading the ICSUs the most.

Interface Control and Signalling Unit (ICSU)

The Interface Control and Signalling Unit (ICSU) performs those RNC functions that are
highly dependent on the signalling to other network elements. The unit also handles distributed
radio resource management related tasks of the RNC.
The unit is responsible for the following tasks:
• layer 3 signalling protocols RANAP, NBAP, RNSAP, RRC, and SABP
• transport network level signalling protocol ALCAP
• handover control
• admission control
• load control
• power control
• packet scheduler control
• location calculations for location based services
According to the N+1 redundancy principle (for more information, see Section Redundancy
principles).there is one extra ICSU in addition to the number set by the dimensioning
rules. The additional unit is used only if one of the active units fails.

Control Plane Events

ICSU load is mainly from the following control plane events:
• CS call attempt
• PS call attempt
• DCH – FACH
• HS_DSCH – FACH
• FACH - PCH
• DCH – PCH
 • Paging
• NAS Signaling (SMS, LAC, RAC, IMSI attach/detach, SCC, etc)
• SHO
• NBAP measurement

Control plane events frequency can be calculated from counters in the attached table.

ICSU_loading.xls

Major Contributor to ICSU load

Control Plane Event Weights

- Weights:

- Weight calculations

- Weight[i] = offset[i] + RRCoCCH[%] * gradient

 Where

- • i – signalling event

- • RRCoCCH[%] = M1001C679/ M1001C1

ICSU Load Estimation

- Formula to calculate ICSU load:
Load = ∑ (event _ rate[i] * weight[i]) / ICSUs _ number
over _ all _ signalling _ events

- Additionally (due to debugging process) in case ICSU CPU load is < 50%, then 8.5% of
relative load should be added to the calculated ICSU load.

• Estimated ICSU load = 1.085 * Load

The load of the ICSU is not exactly linearly increasing with the number of events as there is RRC debugging
done when the ICSU load is less than 40% and it will be turned off when load exceed 50%. Due to this
debugging process 8.5% of relative load should be added to the calculated ICSU load in case ICSU CPU load is
< 50%. The model does not take into account the load caused by Megamon. So in case this is used, the
estimated CPU load might not match well with the measured CPU load
ICSU Load (last option if Upgrade/Balancing/Rehome cannot be
carried out on time)
Summary :