S11.

5
PCU Memory, Overload Protection
and Capacity Enhancements
BSS115167

PCU Training
15.10.2003
Ari Kosonen

1 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 S11.5 PCU Capacity/Overload Protection - feature
• Optimizing the PCU memory usage (Only for Chorus PCU)
• Limit the maximum number of TBFs connected to PCU
• Remove PM statistics buffer (included already to S11)

• Securing the PCU Capacity (Only for Chorus PCU)

• Limit the connectivity of the older PCU variants to ensure required throughput

• PCU Overload Protection actions (Chorus PCU & IMS GW)

• based on NCCR
• the other methods based on EQoS will be introduced with EQoS-feature

• Internal Counters for verifying the PCU load related items

• The counters are read using a service terminal extension

• Reference Configuration for PCU Capacity evaluation

• to collect information on trends of PCU capacity as it varies over different PCU variants
and SW releases
• to estimate PCU capacity in different configurations

2 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 Optimizing the PCU Memory Usage
• Reducing the maximum number of TBFs per PCU to 2048 (from 4096) in order to
reduce overdimensioned memory reservations for TBF structures.

• Currently the maximum number of TBFs is based on theoretical values; i.e.

assuming full occupation of maximum number of TSLs
256 TSLs * 7 UL TBFs + 256 TSLs * 9 DL TBF = 4096 TBSs per PCU

• The new limits are not dependent on the number of TSLs:

max. 896 UL TBFs and 1152 DL TBFs  max. 2048 TBFs per PCU

• Remove PM statistics buffer (included already to S11)

• Other memory optimization items postponed:

• Abis pool optimization
• RLC data structure optimization
• other smaller items

3 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 Securing the PCU Capacity
• Each connected channel uses it’s own share of PCU processing capacity

PCU Load
100% PCU Load
100%

Data Load
Data Load
Idle Load
Idle Load
Throughput
Throughput

• To ensure enough capacity for actual GPRS/EGPRS traffic, the Abis connectivity of the most
performance-challenged PCU types shall be limited.
• A new connectivity limit for PCU and PCU-S variants is introduced
• the number of connected radio channels is limited to 153 (the final value to be defined after testing
with S11.5 software)
• Total number of Abis channels with EDAP slave channels may exceed this value
• the limit can be exceeded with additional channels
• total max. number of Abis channels remains 256
• The radio channel connectivity of newer PCU variants (PCU-T and PCU-B) is still 256 channels

4 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 PCU Overload Protection for S11.5 (NCCR)
PCU load
e.g. 99 %
pcu_load_guard_limit

e.g. 97 %
pcu_load_upper_limit

e.g.90 %
pcu_load_lower_limit

time

• Lower limit: every second measurement report ignored

• Upper limit: reject requests for new MS NCCR contexts; move MSs from
NC2 to NC0
• NEW: Guard limit: (not used with NCCR)
• Other overload protection actions remain unchanged in S11.5
• The new overload protection mechanisms based on scheduling rate reduction
and discarding PFCs will be introduces with EQoS.

5 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 PCU Overload protection for EQoS
PCU load
e.g. 99 %
pcu_load_guard_limit

e.g. 97 %
pcu_load_upper_limit

e.g.90 %
pcu_load_lower_limit

time

• Lower limit: Requests for new PFCs rejected as well as requests to allocate new TBFs for existing
PFCs
• Upper limit:
• PFCs carrying background class traffic and having insufficient quality are torn down.
• Adjustment of scheduling rate is started. The scheduling rate is reduced according to PCU load:
below upper level rate is 100%. If the load continues to rise, the scheduling rate is reduced until it
at 100% PCU load only idle frames are generated.
• Guard limit: All PFCs with insufficient quality are torn down
• The methods based on NCCR are also used.

6 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 Internal Counters
for PCU load
• Following internal counters will be introduced in S11.5:
• Number of occasions when max. number of uplink TBFs has been reached
• Number of occasions when max. number of downlink TBFs has been reached
• Number of occasions when creation of MS NCCR Context has been rejected due to PCU load
• Number of times when PCU load has exceeded pcu_load_lower_limit
• Number of times when PCU load has exceeded pcu_load_upper_limit
• Number of times when PCU load has exceeded pcu_load_guard_limit
• Total time spent on overload situation (above pcu_load_lower_limit)

• The updating program blocks reset the counters in startup. After that the counters are updated
infinitely, i.e. if the max value (232) is reached the updating starts again from zero.

• A Service Terminal Extension shall be introduced to collect and show the counter values. New
messages are introduced to collect the counters (STEPCU) and to provide the counter values
(PCUSTE).

• When the counters are requested by the Service Terminal Extension, the updating program block sends
the current counter values and resets the counters.

7 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential

 Reference Configuration
for PCU Performance evaluation
• To get comparable results from performance evaluation of different PCU variants
as well as different PCU SW releases, the tests shall be performed using as similar PCU
configurations as possible.
• Several variants for Abis configurations are needed.
• Current proposal for Reference Configuration:

Item Value
Number of BTSs 16
Number of TRXs 32

Number of MSs As high as possible

Class of MSs Multislot-2 (2 DL+1 UL TSLs)
Used CS/MCS CS-2/MCS-7

Abis configurations: “GPRS” “Real-life” “EGPRS”

Number of EGPRS None 31 64
channels
Number of GPRS 256 (153) 100 None
channels
Number of 16-bit EDAP None 124 192
channels
Number of EDAP pools None 16 16

Number of SMCHs 32

LLC PDU size 512 bytes

PCU SW Package Latest stabile package

Gb interface 1984kbit/s (UL) + 1984 kbit/s (DL)

8 © NOKIA S11.5 PCU Capacity.PPT / 10-10-2003 / AKo Company Confidential