LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 As a UE attached to the LTE network, in the initial context setup process is triggered
to establish the first E-RAB, which is the default. Depending on the service
requirement, the dedicated bearer establishment procedure would be triggered
accordingly.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 eNodeB sends a UE CONTEXT RELEASE REQUEST message to the MME, , all E-

RABs of the UE are released. If the release cause is not among the following reasons,
the release is abnormal:
 “Normal Release”, ”Detach”, ”User Inactivity”, “Om-Intervention”, ”CS Fallback
triggered”, ”UE Not Available for PS Service”, ”Inter-RAT Redirection”, ”Time
Critical Handover”, ”Handover Cancelled”, ”Redirection towards 1xRTT”
 eNodeB sends an E-RAB RELEASE INDICATION message to the MME to release
specific bearer, the normal release cause showed below:
 “Normal Release”, “Detach”, “User Inactivity”, ”Om-Intervention”, “CS Fallback
triggered”, “UE Not Available for PS Service”, “Inter-RAT Redirection”,
“Successful Handover”, “Redirection towards 1xRTT”

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Probe and Assistant define Call Drop in the following five scenarios：
 Without receiving the “DEACTIVATE EPS BEARER CONTEXT REQUEST
“ from MME, or sending “ DETACH REQUEST ” to MME, UE receive “RRC
Connection Reconfiguration” message including “drb-ToReleaseList ”
 Without receiving the “DEACTIVATE EPS BEARER CONTEXT REQUEST
“ from MME, or sending “ DETACH REQUEST ” to MME, UE receive “RRC
Connection Release” message if the RLC-layer data is transmitting(uplink or
downlink) in the previous 4s
 Before receiving RRC release command UE enters Idle Mode abnormally
 Without receiving “RRC Connection Reconfiguration“, “DEACTIVATE EPS
BEARER CONTEXT REQUEST” or “RRC Connection Release”, UE triggers
“RRC Connection Request” message
 RRC connection reestablish failure

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Throughput deteriorate to zero when call drop happen:

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 On UE side, the related data typically collected by drive test software like Probe/CDS:
 Use the drive test software to perform signaling tracing over the Uu interface,
check the signaling procedure, identify the call drop issue
 Use the drive test software (such as Probe) Event list to quick locate the event
and signaling for the call drop
 Use the drive test software check the channel quality of the call drop, such as
RSRP, RSRQ, and SINR, to analyze the cause of call drop
 On network side, the data can be collected on U2000:
 UU/S1 interface signaling on eNodeB side
 Use the UU and S1 interface signaling tracing to record the standard
signaling during the call drop occurrence
 Compare the UU interface signaling collected on UE side and eNodeB
side to check whether the call drop caused by air interface interaction
 Check the release cause in UE Context Release Request/E-RAB
Release Indication message to analyze call drop

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LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Load and channel quality data on eNodeB side

 Check the load status of eNodB by the User Statistic Monitoring and
Usage of RB Monitoring
 Check the interference of eNodB by the RSSI Statistic Monitoring and
Interference Detect Monitoring
 Check the channel quality of eNodB by the DL RSSP/RSRQ Monitoring,
BLER Monitoring, Quality of Channel Monitoring, MCS Count
Monitorinng
 S1/S11 Data Collection on MME side
 Compare the S1 interface signaling collected on MME side and
eNodeB side to check whether the call drop caused by s1 procedure
failure
 Check the S11 signaling message to analyze abnormal cause of bearer
modification and bearer release

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 The replacement method can be used to identify the call drop caused by terminal,
which is not discussed in this course.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 For the transmission and core network issue, wireless engineers should transfer to
the corresponding team to analysis.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Call Drop analysis procedure

Call Drop during Y Transfer to terminal

Terminal Issue?
DT vendor

Y
Cell Fault? Handle cell fault issue Solved?

N
N
Analysis log

Y Handle Channel/HO
Air interface issue?
issue

N
Transmission Y Handle network
Solved?
issue? transmission issue

Core network Y Handle core network

issue? issue

Collect tracing log/CHR and Debug log,

transfer to HW engineer

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LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Poor channel quality could cause radio link failure, signaling interaction failure,
resynchronization failure, reestablish failure etc.
 As shown in figure 1, call drop happened for the terminal in the weak coverage
area (RSRP<-105,SINR<-10) due to neighboring cell faulty
 Figure 2 shows the signaling when call drop happened. After sending MR
consecutively to eNodeB, UE received HO command. And then UE try to the
reestablish but rejected and call drop happened.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 When HO too late, UE would probably reestablish to another cell after HO failure,
under these circumstances, call drop may happen because of the reestablish rejected.
 Ping-pong handover occurs with a large number of signaling interaction, which may
induce a high probability of reestablish that could cause Call Drop.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 After handover failure, UE would reestablish to the cell with best signal strength. If the
target cell does not have the UE context, the reestablish would be rejected and cause
call drop.
 Attached is the log for the scenario that UE reestablish to non-source target site

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 The typical phenomenon: eNodeB don’t receive MR, the source eNodeB don’t handle
MR, UE don’t receive HO Command.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 The threshold used to triggered measurement in source cell handover is too low, so
the inter-frequency/inter-system handover measurement is not started or starting too
late, this would cause handover too late or even the handover failure.
 If the handover offset of intra-frequency neighboring cell is too small, or the inter-
frequency/inter-system handover threshold too high, the handover may hard or too
late to be triggered, this may cause handover failure.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 A1：Ms – Hys > Thresh1

 A2：Ms + Hys < Thresh2
 A3：Mn + Ofn + Ocn – Hys > Ms + Ofs + Ocs + Off
 A4：Mn + Ofn + Ocn – Hys > Thresh3
 A5：Ms + Hys < Thresh2 且 Mn + Ofn + Ocn – Hys > Thresh3
 B1：Mn + Ofn – Hys > Thresh4
 B2：Ms + Hys < Thresh2 且 Mn + Ofn – Hys > Thresh4
 If the handover type is based on frequency priority, all the value should be adjusted
the reverse of above

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 The missing or incorrectly neighboring cell configuration results in measurement result

not processed or the wrong identification of target cell, which may also cause
handover too late and induce call drop.
 NCL and NRT checking:
 LTE external cell relation: LST EUTRANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE intra-frequency neighboring cell relation: LST
EUTRANINTRAFREQNCELL
 LTE inter-frequency neighboring cell relation: LST
EUTRANINTERFREQNCELL
 LTE UTRAN external cell relation: LST UTRANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE UTRAN neighboring cell relation: LST UTRANNCELL
 LTE GERAN external cell relation: LST GERANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE GERAN neighboring cell relation: LST GERANNCELL

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Add/Modify LTE neighboring relation:

 LTE external cell relation: ADD/MOD EUTRANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE intra-frequency neighboring cell relation: ADD/MOD
EUTRANINTRAFREQNCELL
 LTE inter-frequency neighboring cell relation: ADD/MOD
EUTRANINTERFREQNCELL
 Add/Modify UTRAN neighboring relation:
 LTE UTRAN external cell relation: ADD/MOD UTRANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE UTRAN neighboring cell relation: ADD/MOD UTRANNCELL
 Add/Modify GERAN neighboring relation:
 LTE GERAN external cell relation: ADD/MOD GERANEXTERNALCELL
 LTE GERAN neighboring cell relation: ADD/MOD GERANNCELL

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 MR lost due to poor radio channel quality or UE fails to receive a handover instruction,
and as a result, the handover cannot be triggered duly.
 Handle quality issue can be resolved key metrics measurement and evaluation, the
uplink and downlink channel quality, the following analysis of the measurement entity,
you can use the DT tool to test or U2000 tracing:
 For the channel quality issue, aome key measurement KPIs could be used for the
evaluation:
 RSRP
 If RSRP<-110, the coverage is poor; if RSRP<-118, it will influence the
decoding
 SINR
 If SINR<0, the downlink channel quality is poor; if SINR<-3, it will
influence the decoding
 PHR
 If uplink UE transmit power larger than 18dBm, the uplink coverage is
poor
 MCS
 If MCS distributed around 0~5, the downlink channel quality is poor
 IBLER

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LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 If IBLER>20%, the channel quality is poor

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 For the downlink coverage optimization, the antennas can be used for adjusting the tilt
angle, and also the power adjustment, and transmit diversity solution could be used.
 For the uplink coverage optimization, the receive diversity or TTI Bounding technology
could be used.
 For the intra-frequency networking interference problems, adjust the antenna tilt and
azimuth to control the coverage, and may also introduce ICIC function for the
interference coordination.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Due to improper handover threshold and offset setting, it’s very easily for UE to meet
the handover decision condition within the service cell and the neighboring cell, this
may cause the frequently handover between the serving cell and the neighboring cel.
 Due to the to short trigger time reporting, the signal level of neighboring cells may not
reach a stable level when the measurement report is reported, this would result in
another handover because of the poor signal quality.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 If the coverage overlap coefficient is less than 3 in ping-pang HO area, the possible
cause could be the improper parameter setting.
 coverage overlap coefficient: the number of neighboring cell which the RSRP gap is
less than or equal to 6dB compared with serving cell which RSRP is larger than -
110dBm

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 If the number of neighboring cell which the RSRP gap is less than or equal to 3dB
compared with serving cell is more than 3, this would form severe coverage
overlapping. Severe coverage overlapping areas tends to cause UE ping-pong
handover, resulting in poor user experience.
 If the coverage overlapping coefficient is larger than 3 in ping-pang HO area, the
possible cause could be the overlapping.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Wireless channel quality is poor, such as weak coverage and interference problems,
the solution of signaling and data may fail, caused by retransmission reaches the
maximum number of times a radio link failure.
 RSRP < -110 dBm is the weak coverage reference value which is the
demodulation threshold of UE. Once taking the interference margin into
account, the typical weak coverage threshold could be -110 dBm.
 If the signaling and data retransmission exceeds the maximum number of
retransmission, the radio link would be failure, which triggers reestablishment:
 Maximum retransmission times of signaling:
RBRLCPDCPCFG.UeMaxRetxThreshold
 Maximum retransmission times of data:
RLCPDCPPARAGROUP.UeMaxRetxThreshold

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 In large coverage area of suburban and rural area, the TMA could be introduced to
improve the uplink coverage, but the interference would be amplify.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Signaling interaction failure may occur during the procedure bearer establish, channel
configuration, power control, scheduling, measurement control, CQI report, MIMO
mode, and SRS due to poor radio link quality, terminal capability, and timer
configuration.
 Analysis:
 Start the UE signaling tracing over the Uu interface on the side and the base
station side, check the signaling of the delivery and response, it is confirmed
that the call drop process if no signaling exchange fails because the problem
exists.
 Statistics PDCCH/PDSCH/PUSCH channel IBLER, check whether the channel
corresponding to the retransmission in case of quality issues.
 Check the terminal capability, check whether to support the function of
delivering the configuration.
 Check the UE capability reporting and related capability indication in the
feature group, such as the RLC mode, ROHC compression type, and CQI
reporting mode, and GAP configuration
 Check whether the UuMessageWaitingTimer is set to an appropriate value.

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 In order to achieve the UE power saving and solve the network congestion etc. ,UE
may work in the uplink out-of-synchronization state. When there are new data needs
to be sent, UE would achieve uplink timing advance calibration, ensure the reliability
of the data sending or receiving by random access to implement uplink
resynchronization.
 When a UE in the out-of-synchronization state in the uplink, if there is downlink data
service requirement, eNodeB would send PDCCH order to initiate a non-contention-
based random access to implement the resynchronization. If the uplink data service
required, UE initiate contention-based random access to complete resynchronization.
 The resynchronization procedure includes the trigger of synchronization and a
random access process, which occurs on the control channel and the lower layer of
the protocol stack, so we can collect CHR to assist the confirmation and analysis.
 Due to weak coverage or interference issues, eNodeB may cannot correctly decode
the preamble UE send for resynchronization, UE may cannot demodulate MSG3
resource scheduling, and eNodeB may cannot correctly decode the MSG3 message,
thus UE can’t finish uplink resynchronization, and call drop happen.

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 Based on the signaling procedure the reestablish scenario is classified into the
following types:
 Failed to restore SRB, that is, eNodeB sends the
RRCConnectionReestablishment, but does not receive the
RRCConnectionReestablishmentComplete message from UE.
 Failed to restore the other RB in the reestablish procedure, that is, eNB sends
the first RRCConnectionReconfiguration, but does not receive an
RRCConnectionReconfigurationComplete message from UE.

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 The congestion triggering scenario:

 The services are diverse and the data rates is not stable, sometimes high and
sometimes low, so the service data volume inevitably affect the load.
 Due to the mobility of the user, one certain service with the same data
transmission rate may require different radio resource because of the radio
channel condition variety.
 Only the GBR services could cause congestion.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 For the TOP cell, if the number of maximum user less than the LIC but the PRB usage
keeps continuous high, and the PDCCH aggregation level is high, this may be caused
by control channel and traffic channel limited resources leading to call drop.
 Measurement related to radio network resource congestion:
 Average number of used uplink PRBs: L.ChMeas.PRB.UL.Used.Avg
 Average number of used PDSCH PRBs: L.ChMeas.PRB.DL.Used.Avg
 Number of times the PDCCH occupies X symbol in a measurement period:
L.ChMeas.PDCCH.SymNum.X
 Number of times of PDCCH resource allocations with aggregation level X:
L.ChMeas.PDCCH.AggLvlXNum
 Number of samples with the PUSCH PRB usage ranging within index X :
L.ChMeas.PRB.PUSCH.Util.Samp.IndexX
 Number of samples with the PDSCH PRB usage ranging within index X:
L.ChMeas.PRB.PDSCH.Util.Samp.IndexX
 The PRB resource usage distribution indexes (0 to 9) are defined as follows:
 Index0:[0, 10%)
 Index1:[10%, 20%)
 …
 Index9:[90%, 100%]

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Typically RRC reestablish failure are caused by handover failure, reconfiguration

failure, or radio link failure, downlink out-of-synchronization.
 Conditions for successful reestablish:
 The security of the AS layer should be activated, otherwise, UE would
releases the connection and return to Idle Mode.
 The reestablish target cell should have UE context.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 The virtual user trace shows eNodeB receives the first seven measurement report, it
means the left five MR lost during the air interface transmission. Finally UE loses
synchronization and reestablish initiated.

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 LTE TNL call drop performance of the signaling tracing: eNodeB sends an
S1AP_UE_CONTEXT_REL_REQ message, including the cause value of “ transport
Resource unavailable ”.

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 Transmission ports configuration, transmission network faulty, intermittent

transmission interruption could cause transmission issue, leading to call drop.
 Transmission related alarms:
 ALM-25888 SCTP Link Fault
 ALM-29207 eNodeB Control Plane Transmission Interruption
 ALM-25886 IP Path Fault
 ALM-25952 User Plane Path Fault

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 Once the transmission congested, new access high-priority services can preempt
resources of low-priority services, and emergency call user with admission failure can
preempt a low-priority user resource, as a result, call drop happened to some users.
 Once eNodeB detects the load of the logical port exceeds the OLC threshold ,
eNodeB would release the user-specified bearer based on the ARP priorities.
 Once eNodeB preemption algorithm switch is turned on, due to congestion of
transmission resources has an emergency call after the user fails to be admitted,
preempt the speaker in a low-priority user resources, and as a result, the bearer of
low priority users are released, and TNL call drops.
 Transmission resource congestion related alarm:
 ALM-25889 SCTP Link Congestion

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 The source eNodeB sends the handover command, but the target eNodeB does not
receive the handover complete, the problem occurs during the UE receives the
handover command and accesses to the target cell.

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 Note
 E-RAB Abnormal release caused by MME is not calculated in the call drop

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Core network congestion, like MME overload could cause signaling interaction failure
and bearer abnormal release, leading to call drop.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 Inappropriate setting value of parameters that influence signaling interaction, like

HOT3 timer, will cause signaling interaction failure, so that the eNodeB initiates the
UE release and cause call drop.

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 LTE Call Drop Diagnosis (Drive Test)

 If call drop happen after successful handover on air interface, typical the cause should
be the target site issue.

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 By analyzing the CDL log of target cell, it is found that after UE handover to the target
cell, the source eNodeB send S1 path swith request to EPC. But it does not receive
S1 path swith request ACK from MME.

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 For the call drop caused by transmission or core network, the end to end signaling
tracing could be used to help for troubleshooting. All the transmission or core network
issue need to be analyzed by transmission or core network team.

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