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Advanced Baseband Technology in Third-Generation Radio Base Stations
Advanced Baseband Technology in Third-Generation Radio Base Stations
WCDMA, one of the technologies selected for the air interface of the Architecture of the radio
3GPP standard, is widely used in emerging third-generation mobile com- base station
munication systems. This interface supports data rates of up to 2 Mbit/s
on a common 5 MHz frequency carrier. Moreover, with the introduction of The functionality of a radio base station
HSDPA, the peak service rate for packet access in the downlink can be (RBS) is divided into two main parts: user-
plane functions and control-plane functions.
increased to more than 10 Mbit/s.
The user-plane functions are associated with
Ericsson’s radio base station has been designed to comply with the transport, baseband, radio and the antenna.
3GPP standard. The kernel part of WCDMA technology has been imple- The control-plane functions pertain to the
mented in the baseband of the radio base station. Compared to previous transmission of user data and operation and
generations, the baseband signals in WCDMA are spread with a high maintenance (O&M) data. Ericsson’s RBS is
chip-rate code at 3.84 megachips per second on a 5 MHz frequency band. based on the connectivity packet platform
This is much wider than the frequency band used in GSM, cdmaOne and (CPP, formerly called Cello packet plat-
CDMA2000, or PDC. Therefore, to process the signals, more advanced form)—that is, the RBS employs the infra-
technology is deployed in WCDMA baseband. Ericsson’s baseband tech- structure of hardware and software modules
nology uses the very latest ASIC, DSP, and FPGA technologies. provided in CPP.1
Numerous requirements are being channeled toward the baseband Figure 1 shows a typical indoor RBS with
power subrack, baseband subrack, radio fre-
platform, both to support a technical implementation of WCDMA and to
quency subrack and power amplifier sub-
satisfy operator and radio network management points of view. Being the rack.2 User-plane signals from the radio net-
kernel in WCDMA, the baseband platform must be able to efficiently han- work controller (RNC) via the Iub interface
dle the entire life cycle of an RBS, from initial deployment, with a low- are input directly via CPP boards to the
cost, low-content focus, to subsequent scaling for newly developed ser- baseband parts, whereas control-plane sig-
vices and traffic growth. Moreover, it must do so while networks are nals are input to the baseband parts via the
evolving and expanding with more users and new mixes of end-user ser- traffic and O&M control parts of the main
vices. New radio network functions and features will also be added processor. Figure 2 shows the architecture
through base station hardware and software to perfect the WCDMA sys- of the Ericsson RBS3000.3 Please note that
tem. for simplicity’s sake the CPP parts and main
The authors describe the implementation of Ericsson’s WCDMA base- processor are not shown.
The architecture can be broken down into
band. They also show how it has been prepared to grow with and meet
a cell-specific part and a non-cell-specific
the needs of future developments by facilitating small, incremental part. The cell-specific part contains trans-
upgrades and thanks to a flexible architecture that supports the expan- ceiver (TRX) boards, multicarrier power
sion of the uplink and downlink together with critical functionality that amplifier (MCPA) boards and antenna in-
resides in loadable hardware. terface unit (AIU) boards, whereas the com-
mon part contains boards for baseband pro-
cessing. In Figure 2, the baseband process-
ing has been split between the transmitter
(TX) and random access and receiver (RAX)
boards. The TX board handles downlink
processing and enables coding, spreading
Figure 1 and modulation. The RAX board handles
Indoor RBS and baseband subrack. uplink processing and enables demodula-
tion, de-spreading and decoding.
Baseband functions
The physical layer functions on the baseband
boards have been implemented to include
• the mapping and de-mapping of physical
channels and transport channels;
• multiplexing and demultiplexing;
• channel coding and decoding;
• spreading and de-spreading;
• modulation and demodulation;
• physical layer procedures; and
• physical layer measurements.
In addition, the baseband boards in a radio
base station perform the following functions:
Figure 6
Backward hardware compatibility.
tion. Figure 6 shows the backward hardware • inserts the first discontinuous transmis-
compatibility concept. The baseband unit, sion (DTX);
C, is added to the existing RBS to improve • matches rates; and
functionality and capacity. • performs the first interleaving.
To fit the 10 ms radio frame, the transport
Downlink processing blocks from different transport channels are
multiplexed in the multiplexing unit
board—TX board (MUX) function block. This activity is fol-
lowed by insertion of the second DTX, the
Downlink processing functions
second interleaving, and multicode split-
Figure 7 shows the main function blocks for ting. Data and control information are then
processing the downlink. Each of these sent to the cell-split function block. The
blocks also contains other baseband func- control information contains transport for-
tions (not pictured). The first process is frame mat combination indicator (TFCI) bits and
protocol (FP) handling (pictured left). After corresponding transmission power control
confirming when the data frames on the com- (TPC) commands which have been mapped
mon channels (paging channel, PCH, and with pilot bits onto the dedicated physical
forward access channel, FACH) and the ded- control channel (DPCCH).
icated channels (DCH) arrived from the Iub After the frame protocols have been han-
interface, the frame protocol handler aligns dled, the broadcast channel (BCH, which is
the frames and extracts the payload part of mapped to the primary common control
the data frame. The payload part contains the physical channel, P-CCPCH, and to PCH
data of the uncoded transport channels. and FACH) and PCH and FACH (which are
For the dedicated channels, the encoding mapped to the secondary common control
function block physical dedicated channel, S-CCPCH) are
• generates the cyclic redundancy check processed in a manner similar to that de-
(CRC); scribed for the dedicated channels. The cell-
• concatenates the transport blocks; split function identifies the common and
• segments the coding blocks; dedicated physical channels that belong to
• performs convolutional coding or turbo one cell carrier. These processes are followed
coding; by modulation, spreading and weighting,
PCH
PCH FP encoding Modulation
spreading
FACH FP FACH
encoding
Figure 7
DL/UL l/f Downlink processing function blocks.
with power information for the downlink to the TRX. It also measures the transmit-
power control, and scrambling. ted code power and handles all cell-carrier
processing-related functionality.
TX board implementation The physical layer processing controller
Figure 8 shows the downlink processing handles the configuration of the symbol-
board (TX board), which is divided into two
main parts: the board processor and board-
specific hardware. The board processor con-
trols the board and parts of the traffic. The
board-specific hardware, which processes Figure 8
user data sent to the air interface, contains TX board implementation.
the Iub user-plane interface handler,
symbol-rate processor, chip-rate processor,
and the physical layer processing controller.
The Iub user-plane interface handler han-
dles the Iub interface user-plane protocol for
the DCH and CCH data streams to the radio
network controller.
The symbol-rate processor handles the
transport channel (TrCH), the coded com-
posite transport channel (CCTrCH), the
physical channel for the primary and sec-
ondary common control physical channels,
the paging indicator channel (PICH), and
the dedicated physical channel (DPCH).
The chip-rate processor handles the dis-
tribution of physical channels, generates the
synchronization channel (SCH), the prima-
ry common pilot channel (P-CPICH) and
acquisition indicator channel (AICH), and
transmits the distributed output sequences
and chip-rate processing parts with respect call set-up and power. When the user equip-
to the control of measurements, set-up, re- ment (UE) sets up a call to the RBS, the cor-
lease, and reconfiguration of cell-carriers responding RAX board in the RBS reserves
and channels. sufficient resources. The RAX board then
The functionality of the Iub user-plane in- sends a layer-1 acknowledgement signal via
terface handler and the physical layer pro- the TX board to the UE, indicating that the
cessing controller is implemented in DSPs UE may send the RACH message part. To
to give flexible implementation of control power in the downlink, the RAX
• the controller functions; board detects the TPC commands and sends
• external interfaces to the RNC for the user them to the TX board, which adjusts down-
data interface; and link transmission power.
• interfaces to the board processor for the To control power in the uplink, the RAX
control interface. board compares the signal-to-interference
The symbol-rate processing functionality is ratio (SIR) target with the SIR of the re-
implemented in FPGAs due to processing ceived signals and generates the TPC com-
delay and varying requirements put on the mands, which it sends to the UE in the
throughput of user data. Some flexibility is downlink DPCCH.
also provided in view of changing require-
ments for the implemented functionality.
The chip-rate processing functionality is
Uplink processing
implemented in ASICs. This approach em- board—RAX board
ploys parallel processing to meet the de-
mand for limited processing delay. It also Uplink processing functions
allows synchronous transmission of the dis- In the uplink, the signals received from the
tributed output sequence to the TRX. air interface are input to the baseband in a
Figure 9 shows a TX board used in an digital signal format from the TRX radio
RBS3000. The board can handle multiple part of the RBS (Figure 10). For the dedi-
cell-carriers with more than one antenna cated physical channel (DPCH), the incom-
branch. ing signals from the TRX are processed in
the demodulator function block, which con-
Interface between the TX and RAX boards tains a searcher and RAKE receiver. The de-
The interface between the TX and RAX modulator
boards supports fast signaling for controlling • performs de-spreading;
Figure 10
Uplink processing function blocks.
• recovers the uplink control channel data probability of making correct decisions and
and DPDCH data; improves receiver performance.
• generates uplink TPC (UL-TPC) com- Given the proper spreading code, the
mands; RAKE receiver can de-spread all detected
• detects downlink TPC (DL-TPC) com- multipath rays. Using the pilot bits to es-
mands; and timate channel amplitude, phase, frequen-
• decodes and de-maps the TFCI. cy offset and Doppler spread, the RAKE re-
ceiver processes the multipath rays with the
Searcher corresponding weighting, and combines
In multipath propagation environments, the rays. Before combining the rays, how-
the RAKE receiver must know when the ever, each ray is processed by one RAKE
multipath rays arrive—that is, it must de- finger.
termine the position of the multipath rays To make efficient use of the hardware re-
along the delay axis, so that it can allocate sources, the RAKE fingers can be treated as a
the RAKE fingers to positions where the pool of hardware resources. They can also be
multipath components hit with signal flexibly allocated between users on the same
power. The task of the searcher in the base- RAX. This allocation is made according to
band is to synchronize the RAKE fingers. the position information delivered by the
To speed up the searching process, a nar- searcher. Fewer RAKE fingers are needed in
row searcher window is placed where the rural settings with a line-of-sight connection
multipath rays are expected. However, in between UEs and the radio base station than
some cases, such as soft-handover set-up, the in urban settings with multipath fading.
propagation delay is unknown; therefore, a During softer handover, which is the
wide searcher window is needed that corre- handover between cells in the same RBS and
sponds to the entire cell range. The searcher on the same carrier, the detected signals are
also estimates the profiles of radio channel combined.
delay and sends them to the RAKE receiver. The DPCH signals are demultiplexed and
de-mapped to the DCH of the transport
RAKE receiver channel for the next step of processing in the
The RAKE receiver separates the multipath decoder. The decoder input signal consists
components and combines them coherently of interleaved soft bits from the demodula-
into a large signal vector that provides good tor. The following tasks are performed in the
demodulation conditions. This increases the decoder block: