Fast Dormancy Timings

Nearly a year and half back, I posted a blog about Fast Dormancy here. This issue has
surely been fixed in most of the devices and the networks are able to handle the issue
even if the handsets have not been fixed. I found an interesting table in a Huawei journal
that shows the timings used by different devices that are being reproduced for people who
may be interested.

Posted by Zahid Ghadialy at 12:42 Leave a comment...2 comments so far

Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Links to this post
Labels: Fast Dormancy, Huawei, Signalling, UMTS

Reactions:
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Fast Dormancy in Release-8
Nokia Siemens Networks has collaborated with Qualcomm to carry out the industry’s first
successful interoperability test of the new 3GPP standardized Release 8 Fast Dormancy feature.
Unlike proprietary approaches to fast dormancy, the new standard allows operators to take full
advantage of smart network features such as Cell_PCH without worrying that individual handset
settings will ignore network controls.

The test was conducted at Nokia Siemens Networks’ Smart Lab in Dallas using Nokia Siemens
Networks’ Flexi Multiradio Base Station and Radio Network Controller and Qualcomm’s
QSC7230TM smartphone optimized chipset. The test showed how smartphones can act
dynamically, exploiting Cell_PCH on Nokia Siemens Networks’ smart networks or adjusting to
Fast Dormancy on other vendors’ traditional networks.

In fact the operators have been getting upset quite for some time because of smartphone
hacks that save the UE battery life but cause network signalling congestion. See here.

To explain the problem, lets look at the actual signalling that occurs when the UE is not
transmitting anything. Most probably it gets put into CELL_PCH or URA_PCH state.
Then when keep alive messages need to be sent then the state is transitioned to
CELL_FACH and once done its sent back to CELL_PCH. Now the transitioning back
from CELL_FACH (or CELL_DCH) to CELL_PCH can take quite some time,
depending on the operator parameters and this wastes the UE battery life.

To get round this problem, the UE manufacturers put a hack in the phone and what they do is
that if there no data to transmit for a small amount of time, the UE sends RRC Signalling
Connection Release Indication (SCRI) message. This message is supposed to be used in case
when something is gone wrong in the UE and the UE wants the network to tear the connection
down by sending RRC Connection Release message. Anyway, the network is forced to Release
the connection.