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WCDMA downlink simulator with efficient wrap-around technique

Conference Paper · April 2005

DOI: 10.1109/WOCN.2005.1436071 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 WCDMA Downlink Simulator with
Efficient Wrap-Around Technique
F. Sallabi, A. Lakas, K. Shuaib and M. Boulmalf
United Arab Emirates University
College of Information Technology
P.O.Box 17555, Al Ain, UAE
f.sallabi@uaeu.ac.ae

Abstract- Wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) is
selected as the air interface scheme for 3G wireless networks.
This scheme offers a high data rate that makes the wireless
networks a suitable environment for real-time packet data
services. 3G networks can be used to deliver multimedia traffic
with guaranteed quality of service. Unfortunately, this scheme
faces the scalability challenge in terms of the number of
connections that can be set up in the cellular network. The more
connections take place in WCDMA based network the more
interference is created, which yields more QoS degradation. To
handle this issue, several algorithms that are collectively
alleviate the QoS degradation have been developed and
implemented. In this paper, we provide a system link simulator
that models the WCDMA cellular network with the necessary
radio resource management algorithms. The downlink direction
has been simulated as it is usually the limiting link in setting up
multimedia sessions, and interactive web sessions. The
simulation environment provides a fair source of intra-cell and
inter-cell interference, and avoids session disconnections due to
the limited simulation area.
I. INTRODUCTION
Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) [1]
[2] is the world's choice for 3rd Generation wireless service
delivery. It represents an evolution in terms of services and
data rates from today's 2nd Generation mobile networks.
UMTS is based on Wide-band Code Division Multiple
Access (WCDMA) radio technology, which offers higher
throughput, real-time services, and end-to-end QoS. The
UMTS radio access network will allow for multimedia
applications like simultaneous transfer of speech, data, text,
pictures and audio with maximum data rate of 2 Mbps, which
is a result of using 5MHz bandwidth of the radio channels in
UMTS instead of 200 kHz in GSM [3]. The 3G WCDMA air
interface has been designed to provide a packet based
wireless service, by which different computing and telephone
devices all share the same wireless network and may be
connected to the Internet anytime and anywhere.
Even though UMTS wireless networks provide high data
rate, it is still suffer from the scalability issue in terms of
number of users and the quality of service (QoS). In general,
network service users prefer to be block from using the
service when they request it rather than being preempted or
getting a degraded QoS when they engage in the session. The
capacity of WCDMA is mainly interference based. The more
users are connected to the network the more interference is
evolved in the network. Meanwhile, the higher data rates are
assigned to users the more interference develops and the
lesser number of users are accepted.
Therefore, UMTS networks must utilize algorithms that
manage the network air interface in an efficient manner.
Those algorithms include but not limited to; admission
control, power control, and congestion control [4]. Those
algorithms collectively manage the air interface and maintain
the QoS of admitted users to the service contract. To
effectively analyze the performance of wireless networks as a
whole and the performance of individual algorithms, a
simulation tool that imitates the UMTS environment has to be
developed and implemented.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. An overall
overview of UMTS networks is given in section 2. Section 3
describes the wrap-around technique applied by the simulator.
The system level simulator is outlined in section 4. Then
some results are presented in section 5, to verify the
functionality of the simulator. Finally, the paper is concluded
in section 6.
II. UMTS NETWORK ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW
The UMTS network architecture consists of three parts; the
user equipment, the UMTS terrestrial radio access network,
and the core network. Fig. 1 depicts the packet switched (IP)
service of the UMTS network architecture [2].

0-7803-9019-9/05/$20.00 ©2005 IEEE.

 ^
Conceptually, cells are assumed of having hexagonal shapes,
^
^ ^
☺ which represents a simplistic model for radio coverage. This
☺ • ^ ^
^ ^ ^ • ^ model has been adopted, because the hexagon allows easy
^
^
^
^
☺ ^
^ ☺
^
User Equipment
and manageable analysis of a cellular system [5].
^
☺
^ ^
^
^
^
☺ ^ Node B (Base Station) In simulations, cellular network modeling is limited to a
^ • ^
^
^
^
^
• ^
certain number of cells with strict boundaries. The main
^ ^ ^ concern is the calculation of received power and the amount
^ ^
☺
^ of interference induced in each cell. Mobile stations and base
stations in the cell boundaries behave differently than others
inside the cellular network, because there is no interference
RNC1 RNC2 RNC3 RNC4
received from behind the boundaries. The other matter is the
mobile station continuity; mobiles at the boundary may leave
the network and loose their connectivity to the network. To
HLR1 SGSN1 SGSN2 HLR2 avoid those two problems, a wrap-around technique has been
used in cellular network modeling and simulation.
Diffserv-Based In this section, we present a wrapping technique that
Backbone
considers the hexagonal shapes and the resulted structure of
putting hexagons together. Following are definitions of
GGSN
different cell roles used in the simulation model.
Home-cell: the cell in which the mobile station was first born.
Internet Host-cell: the cell in which the mobile station physically
exists.
Fig. 1. IP section of the UMTS architecture. Serving-cell: the cell with the strongest signal (lowest path
loss) to the mobile station.
The user equipment (UE) consists of the mobile Inner-cell: cell inside the cellular network, not the boundary
equipment, which is the radio terminal used for radio cell.
communication with UTRAN (UMTS Terrestrial Radio Neighbor-cell: cell that is physically adjacent to another cell.
Access Network), and the user identity module (USIM). Boundary-cell: cell at the edge of the cellular network.
UTRAN consists of two components, Node B and RNC Wrapping-cell: virtual neighbor cell at the opposite side of the
(Radio Network Controller). Node B is functionally similar to boundary-cell.
Base Station of the 2G systems. It converts the data flow Wrapped-cell: this is a wrapping-cell with shifted center.
between the UE-Node B interface and the Core Network- Cluster-cell: cell with 6 surrounding cells.
UTRAN interface. It also takes part in some of the radio
resource management such as inner loop power control. RNC Fig. 2 shows a cellular network structure with 19 cells and
is functionally similar to the BSC (Base Station Controller) in a sample cluster-cell. Cells are shown as hexagons and
the 2G systems. It owns and controls the radio resources in its overlapped circles. Hexagonal geometry has exactly six
domain. RNC is responsible for the load and congestion equidistant neighbors, and the lines joining the centers of any
control, and performs admission control and code allocation cells have the same angle degree. The aim of the scheme is to
for new radio links to be established in those calls. It also make all cells have the same cluster-cell size. Inner-cells are
makes the handover decision and outer loop power control. cluster-cells and they act normally. The boundary cells do not
Each RNC controls one or more Node Bs. The core network form a cluster-cell; therefore they do not act as they should
(CN) consists of the routers and switches that connect the do. The first step for resolving the boundary effect is to
RNCs together, and connect the UMTS network to other device a scheme for completing the cluster-cell size for
networks like the Internet and the telephone network. boundary cells. Boundary cells have either 3 or 4 neighbor-
cells which yield 2 or 3 wrapping-cells. To find the
III. CELLULAR NETWORK STRUCTURE corresponding wrapping-cells, we draw a perpendicular line
on the side of the hexagon of the boundary cell and extend
In macro-cell cellular networks environment, cells provide this line until it crosses the center of the boundary cell of the
radio coverage in a radius around a base station. The covered opposite side. Then this cell will be the wrapping-cell of the
distance is determined by the transmitted power of the base boundary-cell. The wrapped-cell is created by shifting the
station, the amount of background noise, and other wrapping-cell to a new position, which makes it a neighbor of
environmental interferences. In a real environment, cells do the boundary-cell.
not provide radial coverage due to interference from
surroundings. Places that have low rise buildings will have
cells that radiate near-perfect circles of coverage, while places
with high rise buildings have distorted coverage.

14
15 13
16 5 12 5
6 4 6 4
1
17 1 11
7 3
7 3
2 antenna height is fixed at 15 meters above the average
18 2 10
19 9
8 Cluster-Cell
10 18
14
Fig. 2. Cellular network structure.
Now, we describe how to keep mobile stations in the
network during their live time. To do this we have to bring
the mobile back to the network when it leaves the network.
The mobile station first born in its home-cell, which is its
host-cell as well. Then and according to a path loss criterion,
we find the serving-cell. The serving-cell could be the home-
cell, neighbor-cell, or wrapping-cell. When the mobile
crosses one of the six sides of the hexagon, it will change its
host-cell and look for the serving-cell. If it crosses a
boundary-cell it will be brought back to the network through
the corresponding wrapping-cell of the boundary-cell. The
above scheme maintains the uniform load distribution of
mobile stations and offers fair amount of interference in all
cells.
IV. SIMULATOR DESIGN AND IMPLEMENATION
In this section, we describe the simulator architecture. The
simulator consists of four layers as depicted in Fig. 3. It is
event driven dynamic simulation, and has been totally
implemented in-house. The simulator is built as a set of Java
modules that can be managed independently. The simulation
program includes two different parts, the animation part and
the WCDMA engine part. The following sub-sections
describe the different modules of the simulator.
A. Radio Network Environment
This layer is responsible for setting up the environment and
update mobile stations after each simulation step. It generates
37 hexagonal cells, and applies the described wrap-around
technique on boundary-cells. Base stations are positioned at
the centre of the cell, and are equipped with omni-directional
antennas with a radius of 577m and unit gain. Distance
between base stations are chosen to be 1Km. Mobile stations
are uniformly distributed in the simulation area. The mobility
module updates the position and direction of the mobile
station.
B. Wireless Channel Characteristics
The channel is characterized by a propagation model that
follows the 3GPP specifications described in [6]. The
specified macro cell propagation model is applicable for
urban and suburban areas outside the high rise core where the
buildings are of nearly uniform height. The base station
rooftop. By considering a carrier frequency of 2 GHz, the
propagation model formula is.
L = 128.1 + 37.6 Log10(R) (1)
Where, R is the base station-mobile station separation in
kilometers, and L is the path loss. After L is calculated, log-
normally distributed shadowing with 0 dB mean and standard
deviation of 10 dB is added.
C. Radio Resource Management
This is where the Radio Resource Management (RRM)
algorithms are plugged. The power control mechanism is used
to maintain the Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) around the
target level. It uses the calculated SIR from the SIR
estimation module to increase or decrease the transmitted
power of base station. As specified in the 3GPP specifications
[6], each channel should not exceed a transmitted power of 30
dBm in downlink, whereas the transmitted power of a base
station is limited to 43 dBm. After each power control
iteration the actual SIR values experienced by each user are
evaluated. If the SIR is lower than a minimum value, the call
is dropped and the user leaves the system.
The congestion control algorithm is applied after each
power control loop to bring the network to its target load. To
control the number of accepted connections we use
interference based admission control. The admission control
is applied onto two types of user connections; immediate and
advance resource reservations. In immediate admission
control, the user submits his request to the network and looks
for an immediate service. While in advance resource
reservation, the user looks for a service to be used in future.
In soft handover, the set of mobile stations simultaneously
communicating with a mobile station is defined as the active
set. A mobile station is connected with one or more mobile
stations (Active set) if the path losses are within the handover
margin.
After each simulation step, various performance metrics
are collected, which are used to test the performance of
different algorithms, and the behavior of the cellular network.
Some performance measures that can be collected during
simulations include; blocking probability, dropping
probability, preemption probability, and admittance
probability, handover rejected connections, etc.
 Environment
Cellular Network Traffic Mobility Update

Network
Generation Generation Module

Radio
Module Module
1.00
0.90
Statistics Collection and Performance Metrics

0.80
0.70

Utilization
0.60
Characteristics

0.50
Wireless
Channel

Propagation Module
0.40
0.30
0.20
0.10
Immediate Closed Loop Congestion Advance 0.00
Management

Handover
Resource

Radio Power Control Radio

Module
0 10 20 30 40
Radio

Resource Control Module Resource

Reservation Module Reservation
Module Module Cell Number
Measurement
Interference

Fig. 5. Cell utilization.

Signal to Interference Measurement Module
The average number of nodes in each cell has also been
monitored, and gave approximately the same value for all
cells, Fig. 6 shows the average number of nodes versus cell
Fig. 3. Simulator architecture.
number.

V. SIMULATION RESULTS
20
18

Average number of
In order to test the performance of the simulator, we ran 16
several simulations assuming that the network is heavily 14

nodes/cell
12
loaded, pole capacity is 20 sessions/cell. For each step of the 10
simulation run, we check the current load, and then generate 8
6
additional sessions to compensate for the expired, rejected, 4
dropped and preempted sessions. The simulations were run 2
using single service of 64Kb/s. Only the first interference tier 0
was considered [7]. The simulation was run for 36000 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
simulation seconds. All performance measures monitored are Cell number
averaged around this simulation time.
The capacity of WCDMA based cellular network is Fig. 6. Average number of nodes.
mainly dependent on the inter-cell and intra-cell interference.
Fig. 4, below shows the other cell to own cell interference. In
this figure, we can observe that the interference is fairly Some other important results are shown in Table I. The
applied to all cells. Fig. 5 displays the utilization of cells at handover rejection probability and the preemption probability
load factor of 90%. Again all cells have nearly the same are the most important for service continuity. The mobile
utilization. station has QoS guarantee in its home cell, but when it moves
to another cell it may loose the QoS. The simulation indicates
that 23% of the handover sessions will be dropped when the
0.6 cell is heavily loaded, and at load factor of 90%. Load control
0.55 preemption may also drop QoS sessions, if no priority is
Other cell to own cell

0.5
0.45 assumed between services. Immediate rejection probability is
interference

0.4
0.35 also high, because the network is heavily loaded.
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15 TABLE I
0.1 SOME IMPORTANT PERFORMANCE MEASURES
0.05
0 Pole capacity (Number of sessions/cell) 20
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 Load factor 90%
Cell Number Immediate rejection probability 0.25
Handover rejection probability 0.23
Load control preemption probability .012
Fig. 4. Other cell to own cell interference.
 VI. CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented a simulation tool that is

implemented in-house to evaluate the RRM algorithms of
UMTS wireless networks. The simulator is built as a set of
Java modules that can be managed independently. This is an
ongoing research to study and enhance the algorithms that
support QoS for multimedia applications that will be
deployed in the UMTS network. Multimedia applications
require stringent QoS in order to perform well in wireless
network, and due to the dynamic behavior of wireless
networks, those requirements pose a real challenge for
researchers and protocol implementers. In this work we
presented the performance and behavior of the cellular
simulator.

REFERENCES

[1] 3GPP, UTRAN Overall Description, TS 25.401, V6.0.0, 2003-03.

[2] 3GPP, Network Architecture, TS 23.002, V6.0.1, 2003-03.
[3] 3GPP, Quality of Service (QoS) Concept and Architecture, TS 23.107,
V5.8.0, 2003-03.
[4] H. Holma and A. Toskala, "WCDMA for UMTS", John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd., 2002.
[5] T. Rappaport, “Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice”,
Prentice Hall, Second edition, 2002.
[6] 3GPP, Radio Frequency system scenarios, TR 25.942 V6.0.0, 2002-12.
[7] A. Masmoudi and S. Tabbane, “Other-cell-interference Factor
Distributed Model in Downlink WCDMA Systems”, Proceedings of the
7th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation
of wireless and mobile systems, Venice, Italy, pages 268-275, 2004.

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