Slow Frequency Hopping and Dynamic Channel Assignment in GSM networks

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Providing high capacity in existing networks at low cost is the actual challenge of telecommunication operators due to traffic growth. A classical network design with the combination of tight frequency reuse, sectorisation, power control and frequency hopping does not allow to reach ultimate GSM performances. So, techniques such as micro/macro cells and efficient radio resources management have to be employed. In this paper, we propose and investigate dynamic channel allocation strategies which are very promising techniques for improving system performances. Various DCA have already been proposed in the literature ([5], [6]). Most of these papers deal with the call blocking rate minimization or the carrier to interference ratio (C/I). Very few methods deal with radio GSM metrics RXLEV and RXQUAL [9]. Moreover, we present a DCA technique which can be combined with a frequency hopping scheme. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 gives a complete description of classical GSM performances. In section 3, a DCA strategy is investigated. Results are evaluated in terms of FER. This algorithm uses SFH and allocation criteria are based on the GSM metrics RXLEV and RXQUAL. The conclusion can be found in section 4. All simulation results presented in this paper were obtained with the following (default) network configuration: Traffic CHannel (TCH) frequency reuse pattern 3, 144 omni-sectorial sites with 4 transmitter-receiver (TRX) TCH per cell, 70% load. The network load is defined as the number of busy channels, no Power control, shadowing standard deviation 8dB, Rayleigh fading [1], Only cumulative distribution function (cdf) performances on TCH TRX is considered, Mobile arrivals follow a Poisson process and calls duration are random exponential variables with parameter 1/120 sec, Only co-channel interference levels are considered.

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In GSM, it is usually considered that when interference level is 9dB below the useful signal level, the source and channel coding make the speech quality good enough. So, it is considered that system performance is acceptable if only 10% of worst values in the C/I cdf are below 9dB. There is an equivalent definition in
1

Bouygues Telecom - Research Department - 51, avenue de lEurope - 78444 Vlizy Cedex France.

terms of Frame Error Rate: if the FER is below 1% during a communication, system performance is acceptable. In this section, we present simulation results on the GSM system performances. More precisely, we study the impact of the frequency reuse pattern, the power control and the Slow Frequency Hopping.  )UHTXHQF\ UHXVH Frequencies are limited resources. To increase the capacity, engineers have introduced the notion of frequency reuse pattern [2]: it is defined as the smallest set of adjacent sectors in which we use all the available frequencies only once. The smaller the frequency reuse, the greater the capacity of the network. However, the smaller the frequency reuse, the greater the interference levels. In practice, operators generally use two frequency reuse patterns. Indeed, due to continuous transmission on the BCCH (Broadcast Control CHannel) carrier, traffic channel (TCH) frequency reuse is usually smaller than BCCH reuse. In a typical network configuration, a reuse factor of 12 is used for BCCH channels and a reuse factor of 3 is used for TCH channels. C/I cumulative distribution function (cdf) performances of three frequency reuse scenarios are presented in figure 1: reuse 3, 4 and 12. Traffic channels are assigned uniformly at random. At 10% worst cases in the cdf, C/I value is 5dB for reuse 3, 7dB for reuse 4 and 16.5dB with frequency reuse pattern 12.

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)LJXUH  5HXVH  ZLWK IDVW IDGLQJ  3RZHU &RQWURO Several algorithms have been introduced in GSM to improve cellular performances: power control, slow frequency hopping (SFH), discontinuous transmission (DTX), etc. The power control is a GSM procedure [9] which minimizes the transmitted power of the mobile and BTS (Base Station Transceiver) while maintaining the C/I. A basic decentralized power control algorithm on RXLEV with partial compensation is presented in this paper: Power Control factor = k *(RXLEV - Threshold) with k in [0;1] Power control is generally used on both radio links. Figure 3 presents uplink C/I cdf (no fast fading) in reuse 3: at 10% worst cases, power control ( with k=0.7) gives 2dB gain. In a fast fading environment, FER is about 8.5%.
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 6HFWRULVDWLRQ There exists two main classes of site configuration depending on the type and the number of antennas: the first type is the omni site, the second one corresponds to sectorised site (a common configuration is a 3sectorised site). At fixed C/I cdf performances, sectorizing a network composed of omni sites increases capacity of about 1.5.  6ORZ IUHTXHQF\ KRSSLQJ Small TCH frequency reuse pattern (3 or 1) produces high capacity networks but also induces high interference levels. So, interference managing techniques such as Frequency hopping are required to secure the radio link quality. Several papers can be found in the literature on SFH ([3],[4]). So, we just recall that frequency hopping introduces two phenomena: the frequency diversity (i.e. fast fading diversity) and interference diversity. The GSM SFH algorithm [8] has been introduced in the simulator with the following configuration: Hopping Sequence Numbers (HSN) are assigned uniformly at random to each cell of the network (HSN=0 is forbidden - no cyclic hopping). There is no particular MAIO (Mobile Allocation Index Offset) planning: in each cell, MAIO are assigned uniformly at random to each TRX.

At fixed load, gains of this technique strongly depend on the number of hopping frequencies and the number of TRX per cell (see figure 4). SFH with 4 hopping frequencies reduces FER from 12% to 9%. With power control and the same network configuration, 8 hopping frequencies are necessary to obtain 1% FER target.

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In this section, we present a dynamic decentralized channel allocation strategy based on uplink radio GSM metrics. In GSM systems, the BTS performs every 104 TDMA frame a measurement report composed of: Uplink RXLEV and RXQUAL of busy channels (the RXQUAL is derived from the Bit Error Rate), The interference level in unallocated channels (the uplink RXLEV of a free channel represents its

interference level). From these data, we suggest to allocate a traffic channel as follows: *5(('< $/*25,7+0 $OORFDWLRQ RI WUDIILF FKDQQHO WR D QHZ PRELOH P LQ FHOO F 1. Free channels of cell c are rearranged in increasing order of uplink RXLEV level, 2. The channel with the lowest uplink RXLEV level is assigned to the mobile m. $ ORFDO UHDVVLJQPHQW SURFHGXUH ZKHQ D PRELOH P OHDYHV WKH FHOO F 1. Find in cell c the mobile m1 allocated to channel ch1 with the greatest uplink RXQUAL, 2. Select the free channel ch2 in the cell c with the lowest RXLEV, 3. m1 is reassigned to ch2. This strategy does not depend on the network configuration. Therefore, this strategy can be combined with a classical SFH scheme. In this case, the results are very interesting (see table 1). We observe a FER gain of about 25% on uplink and 15% on downlink. The reassignment process causes 2 intra-cell handoffs per communication. 1XPEHU RI KRSSLQJ IUHTXHQFLHV  Uplink %FER SFH 8.76 Uplink %FER SFH + DCA 6.96 1XPEHU RI KRSSLQJ IUHTXHQFLHV  Downlink %FER SFH 9.88 Downlink %FER SFH + DCA 8.62  4.35 3.22  5.04 4.24  2.47 1.81  2.85 2.45  1.57 1.05  1.79 1.43  1.16 0.73  1.16 1.00

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In this paper, GSM system performances have been presented and DCA strategy based on the GSM metrics has been investigated. The proposed DCA technique improves FER performances of 25% on uplink and 15% on downlink. Of course, several other strategies have been tested. However, the investigated method seems to provide best gains in terms of FER in a SFH context.

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[1] :& -DNHV, 0LFURZDYH 0RELOH &RPPXQLFDWLRQV, Wiley-Interscience, 1974. [2] 9 + 0DF'RQDOG, $GYDQFHG PRELOH SKRQH VHUYLFH 7KH FHOOXODU FRQFHSW, Bell Syst. Techn. J., , 1541, 1979. [3] -/ 'RUQVWHWWHU ' 9HUKXOVW, &HOOXODU (IILFLHQF\ ZLWK 6ORZ )UHTXHQF\ +RSSLQJ $QDO\VLV RI WKH 'LJLWDO 6)+ 0RELOH 6\VWHP, J. Select. Area in Comm., Vol -6$&, n5, pp 835-848, 1987. [4] $ 6DWK\HQGUDQ 3- 6PLWK, $ WKHRUHWLFDO 6WXG\ RI WKH 3HUIRUPDQFH ,PSURYHPHQW LQ *60 1HWZRUNV GXH WR 6ORZ )UHTXHQF\ +RSSLQJ, Proc. IEEE VTC, pp 2207-2211, 1998.

[5] ( 'HO 5H 5 )DQWDFFL DQG * *LDPEHQH, +DQGRYHU DQG '\QDPLF &KDQQHO $OORFDWLRQ 7HFKQLTXHV LQ 0RELOH &HOOXODU 1HWZRUNV ,IEEE Trans. Veh. Tech., , (2), 229-237, 1995. [6] - &KXDQJ, 3HUIRUPDQFHV LVVXHV IRU G\QDPLF FKDQQHO DVVLJQPHQW, -6$&, pp 955-963, 1993. [7] 7K%LOORQ, $Q LPSURYHG DVVHVVPHQW RI WKH *60 QHWZRUNV &DSDFLW\ DQG 4XDOLW\, Technology Summit Volume1 Telecom 95 pp. 73-75 ,1995. [8] *60 , Multiplexing and multiple access on the radio path. [9] *60 , Radio subsystem link control.