Home3GPPLTE MAC Power Headroom Report Control Element (PHR CE)

LTE MAC Power Headroom Report Control Element (PHR CE)

Prashant Panigrahi April 10, 2015 0
Power Headroom Report MAC control element tells if UE can transmit at a higher
transmission power or not. In basic terms this indicates how much relative
transmission power left in the UE.

So a simple formula for Power Headroom in LTE is

Power Headroom = UE Max Transmission Power � PUSCH Power = Pmax � P_pusch

So if Power Headroom is a positive value, that means UE is still capable to send at

higher Tx power or it is capable of transmitting at higher throughput. If the value
is negative, UE is already transmitting at maximum Tx power.

In the positive Power Headroom case, network may allocate more resource blocks to
the UE, but in the negative Power Headroom case it is assumed that UE is already
using the maximum resource blocks and no need to assign more.

NOTE: The reported power headroom shall be estimated over 1 subframe. The power
headroom shall be estimated only in a subframe where PUSCH is transmitted.

Power Headroom Report Control Element

Power Headroom Report MAC control element is of single octet long. It has three
field with the two left most bits reserved. The rightmost 6 bits are defined as PH
field.

Power Headroom Report Control Element

PH of Power headroom field corresponds to the power headroom level defined in the
following table.

Power Headroom levels for PHR

Power Headroom levels for PHR

Power Headroom Report Mapping

The power headroom reporting range is from -23 �+40 dB.

Power Headroom Report Mapping

When does UE send Power Headroom Report?

There are two way this can be configured in the UE through RRC messages.

1. When down link pathloss threshold is reached (dl-PathlossChange).

2. When periodicPHR-Timer is set, UE send periodically the Power Headroom Report to
the network.

Check for RRC messages like RRC Connection Setup, RRC Connection Reconfiguration to
get the details of the Power Headroom configuration used. Search for IE phr-Config.

PHR-RRC-Message

dl-PathlossChange: DL Pathloss Change and the change of the required power backoff
due to power management. Value in dB. Value dB1 corresponds to 1 dB, dB3
corresponds to 3 dB and so on

periodicPHR-Timer: Timer for PHR reporting. Value in number of sub-frames. Value

sf10 corresponds to 10 subframes, sf20 corresponds to 20 subframes and so on.
prohibitPHR-Timer: Timer for PHR reporting. Specifies, how long PHR transmission is
prohibited. Value in number of sub-frames. Value sf0 corresponds to 0 subframes,
sf100 corresponds to 100 subframes and so on.

Check these specifications for more details:

36.133: E-UTRA Requirements for support of radio resource management

36.321: E-UTRA Medium Access Control Protocol
36.331: E-UTRA Radio Resource Control Protocol