Are Voice Packets Retransmitted in LTE?

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Are Voice Packets Retransmitted in

LTE?
Hooman 17 Dec 2012 7:12 PM 0

Once Voice Over IP (VoIP) is deployed in LTE, the provided Quality of Service (QoS) is going to be a very
important factor for the success of VoLTE (Voice Over LTE). For voice services in general, the MOS
(Mean Opinion Score) is the metric chosen to evaluate the subjective voice quality in the network. There
is a direct relationship between the MOS score, the QoS related parameters, such as latency, and the
number of voice carrying frames which are in error at the receiver end (Frame Error Rate). Typically,
Frame Error Rates larger than 2% result in unacceptable voice quality and dramatically reduced MOS
scores.

In wireless network the problem of dealing with erroneous transmissions in the adverse radio environment
is dealt with using two basic approaches, i.e. the Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Backward Error
Correction (BEC) strategies. The FEC uses redundant bits and error correcting algorithms for dealing with
the problem. The idea is to protect the payload by adding redundant information that allows the receiver to
reconstruct any damage that may have occurred to the payload during the transmission.

In the second strategy, known as Backward Error Correction and also known as ARQ, the errors are
handled by retransmission of the erroneous packet after the receiver indicates (or lack of such an
indication from the receiver after a time period!) that the packet was not received correctly. The
transmitting entity will then retransmit the packet again.

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Are Voice Packets Retransmitted in LTE? - Hooman - Expert Opinion - LTE University Page 2 of 3

There is nothing in principle that prohibits the strategies described in the above to be used in combination.
In wireless, they are almost always are used together. The hybrid use of the BEC and FEC is usually
referred to as HARQ. These principles have been used from the very early days of packet radio services
for example in EGPRS and are used in LTE as well. With the ever increasing bit rates in the wireless
networks, it has become increasingly important to reduce the accumulated latency in the HARQ and that
has pushed the HARQ process to the lower layers in the protocol stack, i.e. Layer 1 and Layer 2. Indeed
the modern use of the word HARQ in the 3GPP standards refers to this aspect as well, and has become
synonymous with the use of BEC and FEC at the PHY and MAC layers, (with interesting additional
possibilities regarding the retransmitted packets.) The round trip delay for a HARQ process is in about
8ms in LTE.

For voice packets the retransmissions cannot continue for too many rounds, since the accumulated
latency becomes difficult to deal with. (Jitter and playback buffers can handle this problem only to a limit).
Given that the HARQ delay is in the order of 10 ms and a voice packet usually carries 20ms worth of
speech, the maximum number of retransmissions is about 2. Higher number of retransmissions may be
possible with more advanced jitter and playback buffers, but not beyond one or two extra tries. Here is the
crux of the matter: In LTE, HARQ operates with an acceptable error rate of up to 10% for each individual
transmission over the air. The accumulated error approaches zero only because of the retransmissions
and forward error correction that is used in the HARQ process. In modern implementation of HARQ, the
first erroneous packet can be used to help in decoding the retransmitted packet as well! This is known as
incremental redundancy. It is also important to note that in LTE one “Block” is sufficient for carrying 20ms
worth of encoded speech frame.

A simplified explanation of why this level of error is tolerable, is that 10% error rate is something of a
sweet spot in HARQ operations. If we strive to make HARQ operate with too little error rate, then the
packets require more redundancy (or we need to spend more radio resources such as power!) On the
other hand, if we go beyond 10% error rate, the throughput is impacted adversely by too many
retransmissions. It is no coincidence that the 10% error rate is stipulated in the 3GPP standards as the
operating point for HARQ. Fortunately, thanks to the immutable laws of probability, it takes only a few
quick retransmissions at the HARQ to push down the error rate to very acceptable levels.

Now we understand why VoIP packets have to be retransmitted by the HARQ process. Recall that in the
beginning we determined that an acceptable voice quality needs to have 98-99% of packets received with
no error (after decoder magic has been applied). However, at the same time HARQ operates happily with
error rates of 10% for each individual transmission. The conclusion is that HARQ must retransmit VoIP
packets or we will be left with 10% frame error rate and a very bad voice quality!

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When HARQ fails, the next safety net in LTE protocol stack is the Radio Link Control (RLC) protocol
which primarily relies on the ARQ process. RLC operates in 3 modes; The Transparent (TM) mode, the
Unacknowledged (UM) mode and the Acknowledged (AM) modes. Unlike 3G UMTS, voice packets in
LTE are transmitted in the UM which means that they get some overhead in the form of an RLC header,
(mainly for reordering out of sequence packets), but will not be retransmitted from this layer. In LTE, we
expect less than 1% of retransmissions to be handled by ARQ at the RLC layer.

The final retransmission mechanism could potentially reside in the application layer and is usually handled
by the TCP protocol. Since VoIP will rely on the nimbler UDP protocol and not the sophisticated TCP, no
retransmissions are expected from the application layer.

In summary the answer to our question is this: YES, NO , NO from bottom up! YES at the Physical Layer,
NO at the RLC layer (but VoIP packets will have RLC headers!) and NO at the Application Layer.

/Hooman

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