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Load balancing performance of dynamic SCell measurement period relaxing in

LTE-A

Conference Paper · January 2013

DOI: 10.1109/CCNC.2013.6488547

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 The 10th Annual IEEE CCNC- Work-in-Progress
Load balancing performance of dynamic SCell
measurement period relaxing in LTE-A
Xiaoyu DUAN, Haotian Zhang, Wenyu LI, Yu LIU, Lin ZHANG
Key Lab of Universal Wireless Communications, Ministry of Education
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Beijing, China
duanxiaoyubupt@gmail.com
Abstract: To meet the requirement of very-high-rate-data
transmission over wide bandwidths, carrier aggregation (CA)
has been regarded as an important technology for Long Term
Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A). It considers both primary
component carrier (PCell) and secondary component carrier
(SCell) and many operations are based on the PCell. In this
paper, the load balancing performance of dynamic SCell
measurement period relaxing in the LTE-A system with CA
has been discussed. Furthermore, it gives the result of SCell
measurement period relaxing window under different user
equipment speed which is both energy-saving and harmless to
the system performance.
Keyword: Carrier aggregation; LTE-A; Load balancing;
PCell; SCell
I. INTRODUCTION
In order to meet the requirement of International Mobile
Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced), LTE
standards have been improved to become the LTE-
Advanced standard which is a candidate technical standard
for the Fourth Generation (4G) mobile system. During the
development of LTE-A, a new technique called carrier
aggregation (CA) has been proposed and adopted as a tool
to support wider transmission bandwidths [1].
In LTE-A, CA was identified as a major feature for the
further enhancement of the peak throughput while
maintaining backward compatibility with LTE Rel. 8 as
shown in Fig. 1. In the CA mode of operation, two or more
component carriers (CCs), each of which is compatible with
LTE Rel. 8, are aggregated. The discussion and simulation
assumptions in carrier aggregation include two kind of
carriers, primary component carrier (PCell) and secondary
component carrier (SCell).



On the other hand, Load balancing, which is meant to
deliver extra gain in terms of network performance, is one
of the most fundamental SON radio resource management
features in a mobile network. In LTE-A the handover
decision, which is made by the serving cell (PCell), relies on
the network configured events reports and downlink
measurements by the user equipment (UE)[2]. To support
load balancing in LTE-A, the corresponding event
evaluation and measurements are carried out by the UE
during the network configured measurement gaps.
In this paper, we first analyse load balancing procedure in
LTE-A system with carrier aggregation. Previous works
[3][4] have shown that the SCell measurement period can be
relaxed to save the UE power consumption. So our goal is to
verify this method in load balancing and find the relax
window which is best for overall system performance.
II. LOAD BALANCING PROCEDURE IN LTE-A
WITH CA
For further discussion we should first have a brief
understanding of carrier aggregation system. LTE-A users
could be configured with multiple CCs by radio resource
control (RRC) signalling and each CC is corresponding to a
serving cell. Layer-3 configuration assign CCs to users,
while Layer-2 perform scheduling and priority handling in
medium access control (MAC) sublayer to realize dynamic
radio resource allocation in all active serving cells.
Load balancing is executed in the premise of this
structure. Essentially it is achieved by adjusting the network
control parameters in such a way that overloaded cells can
offload the excess traffic to low-loaded adjacent cells,
whenever available. The load balancing algorithm aims at
finding the optimum handover (HO) offset value between

the overloaded cell and a possible target cell. This optimised
offset value will assure that the users that are handed over to
the target cell will not be returned to the source cell and thus



the load in the current cell is diminished [5]. According to
 



 



[6], a LB event is initiated when UE detects that a neighbour
cell offers a better signal quality than its currently serving
Fig.1. Carrier aggregation cell. This condition is simplified by just concerning with
intra-cell/intra-frequency handover, and it is referred to as
event A3, which has been formulated as (1)

978-1-4673-3133-3/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 769

 Mt + Oct > Ms + Ocs + off + Hys (1)
Where Ms and Mt are the signal strength or quality
values for serving cell S and target cell T. Mt, Ms are
expressed in dBm in case of RSRP, or in dB in case of
RSRQ. Hys is the hysteresis parameter for this event. off is
the offset parameter for this event. Oct and Ocs are the
cell specific offset of the target cell and source cell,
which are set to zero if not configured.
We can see from Inequality (1) that when Ocs is smaller
or Oct is bigger, it will be easier for UEs camping on the
source cell to migrate to the target cell. We perform load
balancing by automatically adjusting the offsets based on
cell load measurements. These measurement reports
conclude PCell events and SCell events. Based on the
measurement reports, the serving eNB starts LB preparation.
Upon successful LB preparation, the LB decision is made
and consequently the handover Command will be sent to the
UE [7]. The LB procedure within LTE-A is illustrated in
figure 3.
In scenario 3, carrier 1 and carrier 2 cells are co-located
but carrier 2 antennas are directed to the cell boundaries of
carrier 1, so the difference between carrier 1 and carrier 2
varies with UE position. In order to capture the best cell in
time, the cell management policy should be more sensitive.
So it is proposed the policy that Pcell stays on the best
RSRP cell.
According to [3], A4 and A2 events are used to manage
SCell. The SCell should be added to the system if the
current SCell is configured DEACTIVE and its RSRP is
larger than a threshold. If the current SCell is configured
ACTIVE and its RSRP is less than a threshold, the SCell
should be removed from the system.
Regarding to the relaxation of SCell measurement period,
the RSRP of both PCell and SCell are compared when PCell
has new measurement value, which also means that all the
carriers are compared every 200ms. If it is not time to
update SCell's RSRP, its history RSRP will be used. PCell
measurement period is 200ms, and SCell measurement
period configures default with 200ms, 400ms, 800ms and
 !





3200ms.
($ !
 
So the dynamic SCell measurement period relaxing

  proceeds as follows:
)$ !
  1) When the load of a cell (or its load ratio) exceeds a

 

certain threshold, it is identified as the source cell.
+$"
!

  

It will send request to all neighboring cells, the
 

,$"
!
 request information includes load state.


 

-$"

2) After each neighbor cell receives the request, it
# 


checks its load status information, and sends the

 

.$"

information of “cannot be the target cell” directly
back to the source cell if itself is or will soon be
*

(%)

"
 

overloaded.

Fig.2. LB procedure
3) Otherwise, it sends it back with its load status to
the source cell.
The UE periodically performs downlink radio channel
measurements. The procedure starts with the measurement 4) After receiving the load state of neighbor cells, the
source cell will chooses the target cell with
reporting of a LB event by the UE to the serving evolved
smallest overall state value.
NodeB (eNB). Concerning CA system, there are two kinds
of LB: LB between carriers and LB between eNBs. 5) Then the source cell will chooses the edge users to
execute handover on PCell, during which period
III. THE DYNAMIC SCELL MEASUREMENT PERIOD the SCell would be relaxed. The exact
RELAXING WINDOW measurement period would be decided by
As stated in [8], five CA deployment scenarios have been simulation.
agreed for studying CA-related specifications. Scenario 1, IV. SIMULATIONS
scenario 2 and scenario 3 are used more frequently than the
other two scenarios. Also as scenario 3 is more complicate System-level simulations for a LTE-A cellular
network are made to evaluate the performance of the load
than scenario 1 and scenario 2, this paper only gives the
balancing situation in terms of carrier aggregation
simulation results of scenario 3 illustrated below [3]. We
integrated. In the simulation we use four different
would only consider two carriers here, but the result is not histograms respectively to represent performance indicators
limited to two carriers. of different SCell measurement period relaxing window. So
we can compare the efficiency of one window with others
and use the results to guide the settings in real networks.
4.1 Layout, scenarios, parameters
Fig.3. Scenario 3

770
 A regular hexagonal 37 cell layout with an inter site Hys 3dB
distance of 500m and wrap around technique is used to
avoid boundary effects (cf. Fig.4). Each cell has one base
TABLE II UE Distribution
station situated in the center with no sectors divided. We
Number of UE unit 365
assume that every user requests a constant bit rate of 1Mbps. Distribution in each cell Uniform distribution
The LTE-A capacity in this case will be 15 UEs per cell No. of cells(20 UE units/cell) 7
(assuming 10MHz bandwidth). We set the simulation time (15 UEs won’t move out)
to 2 hours and simulation step time to 30 seconds. The No. of cells(10 UE units/cell) 15
relatively slow action of load balancing means that long (5 UEs won’t move out)
simulation durations are needed to study its behavior. The No. of cells(5 UE units/cell) 15
Cell capacity 15UE
main simulation parameters are given in Table 1.
UE speed 3km/h,50km/h

4.3 Results
Simulations are made in terms of handover number per
minute per user, failure rate of LB, total handover times to
examine the performance of the proposed SCell
measurement window.
1). Performance of intra frequency handover
intra frequency HO number per minute
1600
SccMP:200
1400 SccMP:400
SccMP:800

intra frequency handover number per min

SccMP:3200
1200
Fig.4. Network model with wrap-around technique
1000

4.2 User position 800

In order to show the situation of LB, we will artificially 600

create heavy load concentration in our 37 cell network. At
the beginning, a total number of 365 UEs are uniformly 400

dropped according to the setting in Table 2. Each UE 200

engages a random walk in the areas and changes direction 0

every 2.5 second. However, not all UE can move casually. 3km/h 50km/h

We assume 180 UEs would not move out of their original

cell. Thus the heavy load concentration won't be broken by Fig.5. Intra frequency HO number per minute
failure rate of intra frequency LB
UEs’ random walk. 0.1
SccMP:200
0.09 SccMP:400
The scheduler used for the full buffer simulations is SccMP:800
0.08
proportional fair (PF) [9]. First schedule resources for PCell. SccMP:3200
failure rate of intra frequency LB

0.07
If the configuration of the corresponding SCell is ACTIVE
0.06
and the SCell is not scheduled as other UE's PCell, the SCell
0.05
is scheduled following PCell.
0.04

TABLE I Simulation Parameters 0.03

System bandwidth 10MHz 0.02
Cell layout Hexagonal grid, 37 cell sites, with
0.01
wrap-around technique
Inter-site distance (ISD) 500m 0
3km/h 50km/h
Passloss -38.4-35.0log10R(R is the distance
between UE and )
Shadowfading Log-normal with standard deviation Fig.6. Failure rate of intra frequency LB
8dB
Shadowfading correlation 50m It is obvious in figure 5 and figure 6 that SCell
distance measurement periods don’t have much impact on the
Antenna gain -7dB amount of intra-frequency handover and failure rate of intra-
eNB Tx antennas 1 per cell frequency LB. That is because in scenario 3 the LB
UE Rx antennas 2 performance is mainly based on the PCell, which has little
eNB Tx power 46dBm
influence by the SCell measurement periods.
Oct ate rate 30 seconds
Octmax 5dB 2). Performance of inter frequency handover
Δ 1dB
OSth 0.30
Traffic model CBR 1Mbps full buffer traffic

771
 1200
inter frequency handover number per min
Figure 9 shows the result of total handover number. Total
SccMP:200
SccMP:400
handover number includes the intra-frequency handover and
1000 SccMP:800 inter-frequency handover. From figure 9, there is no obvious
inter frequency handover number per min

SccMP:3200
impact of SCell measurement periods on the amount of total
800
handover number per minute, especially when the UE speed
600
is low. That’s because both PCell and SCell are triggered
every 200ms. When SCell doesn’t have new RSRP, its
400 history RSRP will be used, which will result to unnecessary
handover, most of which is inter-frequency handover. As
200
can be seen from figure 9, if the speed of UE is very high,
0
unnecessary inter-frequency handover number will greatly
3km/h 50km/h
increase when relaxing SCell measurement period to 800ms
Fig.7. Inter frequency HO per minute or 3200ms.
failure rate of inter frequency LB
0.1
SccMP:200
V. CONCLUSIONS
0.09 SccMP:400

0.08
SccMP:800 In this paper, the load balancing performance of dynamic
SccMP:3200
SCell measurement period relaxing in the LTE-A system
failure rate of inter frequency LB

0.07

0.06
with CA has been discussed. The system level simulation
0.05
shows that when the UE speed is low, SCell measurement
0.04
period doesn’t have much impact on the LB performance;
0.03
however, when the speed of UE is very high, unnecessary
inter-frequency handover number will greatly increase with
0.02
the increased relaxing SCell measurement period to 800ms
0.01
or 3200ms and also the failure rate of inter-frequency LB
0
3km/h 50km/h increases with the Scell measurement period. So we can set
Fig.8. Failure rate of inter frequency LB
the SCell measurement period window dynamically
according to this principle.
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