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Good Pci Planning Doclterfwp02nov2010pdf PDF
Good Pci Planning Doclterfwp02nov2010pdf PDF
Good Pci Planning Doclterfwp02nov2010pdf PDF
This paper reviews basics of radio planning for 3GPP LTE. Both coverage-limited and interference-limited
scenarios are considered. For the coverage-limited scenario LTE link budget is compared to that of 3GPP Release 8
HSPA+ with 2x2 MIMO. It is shown that, given the same 5MHz bandwidth, both systems have similar cell ranges
but, for a given target bit rate, there exists an optimum LTE system bandwidth that maximizes cell range in both
uplink and downlink. For the interference-limited scenario (with random uncoordinated interference) we illustrate
the relationship between average network load, cell edge target throughput and cell range, as well as the notion
of interference margin for cell range dimensioning. Impact of base station antenna configurations on dual-stream
Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) performance is demonstrated by means of a real-world measurement
example. The impact of advanced LTE radio resource management features are briefly reviewed. Finally, the most
important radio parameter planning tasks are introduced.
1. INTRODUCTION Abbreviations
This paper introduces LTE from the perspec- BCCH Broadcast Channel
tive of radio network planning. The paper is CQI Channel Quality Indicator
mainly targeted for readers with earlier experi- FDD Frequency Division Multiplexing
ence in radio planning and mobile communica- HARQ Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request
tions. Some prior knowledge of radio engineer- HS-DSCH HSDPA Downlink Shared Channel
ing and LTE is assumed as principles of OFDMA LTE Long Term Evolution
and SC-FDMA, as described in 3GPP LTE spec- PCI Physical Cell Identity
ifications, will not be reviewed in this paper. In- PDCCH Physical Downlink Control Channel
stead the reader is referred to well-known liter- PDSCH Physical Downlink Shared Channel
ature references [13]. The most important LTE PMI Precoder Matrix Indicator
radio interface parameters are summarized in PRACH Physical Random Access Channel
Table 1 for the convenience of the reader. Our PRB Physical Resource Block
focus is on the FDD variant of LTE, although PUSCH Physical Uplink Shared Channel
most of the discussion is also applicable to TDD. RS Reference Signal
SINR Signal-to-Interference-Noise-Ratio
TDD Time Division Multiplexing
TTI Transmission Time Interval
1
2 J. Salo et al
Table 1
Summary of main LTE radio interface parameters
Quantity LTE DL LTE UL
System bandwidth 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20MHz 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20MHz
Multiple access OFDMA single carrier FDMA
Cyclic prefix 4.7 microsec / 16.7 microsec 4.7 microsec / 16.7 microsec
Modulation QPSK, 16QAM, 64 QAM QPSK, 16QAM (64 QAM for Cat5 UE)
Channel coding turbo coding turbo coding
HARQ 8 processes, up to 7 retransm./proc 8 processes
Power control none cell-specific and UE-specific
Handover hard, network-triggered hard, network-triggered
Num of Tx antennas 1, 2, 4 1
Transmit signal waveform distortion due The noise bandwidth is about 5MHz for
to transmitter nonlinearities, measured in HSPA+ UL and DL, as well as LTE DL.
terms of Error Vector Magnitude For LTE UL, however, the noise bandwidth
depends on the number of allocated phys-
In both LTE and HSPA the effective value of ical resource blocks (frequency allocation),
depends on the multipath characteristics and since symbols are detected in time-domain
receiver implementation. For HSDPA with re- and noise is accumulated only over the ac-
ceiver equalizer, > 0.9 can be assumed in most tual occupied bandwidth.
cases. In this paper, = 1 is assumed for LTE
and hence Iown = 0. The impact of < 1 can be While HSPA+ and LTE have similar perfor-
seen only at high SINRave ; at low SINRave noise mance in terms of coverage, the same is not true
power dominates the denominator of (1) over in- for system-level capacity under network inter-
terference power, for both HSDPA and LTE. ference, where LTE has advantage over HSPA+
In the remainder of the paper, we drop due to more advanced radio features, such as
the subscript and denote average signal-to- multiuser-MIMO, frequency-domain schedul-
interference-ratio simply with SINR. ing and inter-cell interference coordination.
2.2. LTE versus HSPA+ coverage in noise- 2.3. Optimizing LTE system bandwidth for
limited scenario coverage
In Table 2 link budgets of LTE and HSPA+ are In this section it is shown that, for a given tar-
compared. Both systems have 5 MHz system get bit rate, there is an optimum system band-
bandwidth, 2Tx 2Rx MIMO antenna system, width in DL and UL in terms of maximizing
and equal antenna and RF characteristics for fair coverage. Of course, typically other decision
comparison. Note that the link budget is carrier- criteria besides coverage come into play when
frequency independent, as it is given in terms of choosing system bandwidth for practical net-
maximum path loss, not cell range. A single work deployment. The purpose of the follow-
cell in isolation is assumed, i.e., no interference ing discussion is mainly to illustrate trade-off
(I = 0). between bandwidth and coverage in LTE uplink
The following differences in link budgets can and downlink.
be seen: Downlink (Fig. 1): Consider a fixed rate of
information transmission for a fixed transmit
In HSDPA, L1/L2 control and pilot chan- power. As the number of allocated Physical Re-
nel overhead is a fraction of the total source Blocks (PRBs) becomes larger, code rate
downlink transmit power (typically about decreases and channel coding gain in turn in-
20%). In LTE, L1/L2 control channels con- creases. Therefore, for a fixed DL system band-
sume a fraction of DL OFDM symbols, width it pays off to use as many PRBs as pos-
30% overhead in time/frequency resource sible to minimize required SINR1 . On the other
element usage is assumed in Table 2, cor- hand, if one is allowed to use the system band-
responding to three symbols wide L1/L2 width as a design parameter, there exists an op-
control channel region. timum system bandwidth for a given target bit
rate. This is due to the fact that, assuming fixed
For a given bit rate target, required SINR total transmit power, transmit power per PRB
is slightly different for LTE and HSPA+. (power density) increases as system bandwidth
However, in the noise-limited regime the is reduced. This is illustrated in Figure 1. For bit
difference in target SINR is typically small, 1 OnePRB is a contiguous chunk of 12 subcarriers, or
less than 2 dBs. 180kHz, in frequency domain.
4 J. Salo et al
Table 2
Link budget comparison in noise-limited scenario, a single user at cell edge for 2x2 LTE and 2x2
HSPA+, 5 MHz LTE bandwidth. Target bit rate: 1Mbps DL, 128Mbps UL.
Quantity LTE DL HSDPA LTE UL HSUPA
Transmit power 46 dBm 45 dBm 23 dBm 24 dBm
Antenna + feeder gain 15 dB 15 dB 3 dB 3 dB
MHA gain - - 2 dB 2 dB
Rx Noise Figure 7 dB 7 dB 2 dB 2 dB
SNR target 4 dB 5 dB 12 dB 13 dB
RX sensitivity 105 dBm 105 dBm 117 dBm 118 dBm
Max path loss 164 dB 163 dB 154 dB 156 dB
Sum power of two transmit antennas
max HS-DSCH power 42 dBm per antenna
Category 3 LTE terminal
All bandwidth allocated for the single user in DL and UL.
Eb /N0 target of 2dB for 128 kbps, processing gain of 15 dB .
UL and DL noise bandwidth is 5MHz.
100
98
LTE UL rx sensitivity vs allocated UL bandwidth for different bit rates
where Imax = K k =1 Imax,k is the maximum inter-
100
2Mbps
1Mbps
ference power at cell edge, and k is the sub-
102
512kbps
256kbps
carrier activity factor of the kth cell. We assume
128kbps
that the average cell load is equal for all cells, in
104
other words, k = , for all k.
RX sensitivity [dBm]
106
Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise ratio can be
108
written as a function of SNR, SIR and cell load
110
as
112
114
S
116
SINR = (5)
118
I+N
S
120
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 = (6)
Allocated UL bandwidth [MHz] Imax + N
1
= 1
, (7)
SIRmin
+ SNR
SNR versus SINR for different average load To derive formula for the noise rise, we first
20
=1 define in linear scale
=0.5
15
=0.25
=0.1 I+N
=0.05
NR = (9)
10
N
=0
SNR
SINR [dB]
5 = . (10)
SINR
0 Substituting, SNR = NR SINR in Eq. (7) and
solving for NR results in
5
10 1
NR = SINR
. (11)
10 5 0 5 10 15 20 1 SIR
SNR [dB] min
1 1
SINR = (15)
MAd B N
SIRmin + EIRP
0.9
0.8 1Mbps
2Mbps
0.7 3Mbps
There is a one-to-one mapping between SINR 4Mbps
network load
0.6 6Mbps
and average throughput. Therefore, (15) de- 8Mbps
0.5
scribes the tradeoff between , d and through-
0.4
put. In the sequel, the three two-variable special
cases are considered. 0.3
14
Cell edge throughput versus cell range, for fixed network load 4. MULTIPLE-INPUT MULTIPLE-OUTPUT
24
(MIMO) CONFIGURATIONS
22
20
18 = 0, 0.1, ..., 0.9, 1 While in common engineer talk there are ap-
16 pears to be several interpretations for the term,
14 in this paper MIMO is taken to mean any radio
12
interface that has at least two antennas at both
10
ends, i.e., with this definition smallest MIMO
8
antenna configuration would then be 2Tx 2Rx.
6
Note that in LTE all UEs are required to have
4
two receive antennas, while the number of base
2
station antennas can be2 1, 2, or 4. In principle,
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
Cell range [km]
1.4 1.6 1.8 2
there are three ways to utilize MIMO antennas:
This requires closely spaced antennas, un- In practice, the choice of transmission scheme
like the diversity schemes which require depends on instantaneous radio channel condi-
at least a few wavelength antenna spacing. tions and is adapted continuously. The main dif-
Beamforming using 3GPP codebook also ference to non-MIMO transmission that, in ad-
requires PMI feedback from UE. Mathe- dition to SINR, now also the channel rank has
matically, both beamforming and transmit to be considered, since spatial multiplexing is
diversity are both special cases of so-called feasible only if the instantaneous radio chan-
rank-1 precoding3 . LTE Rel 8 supports nel (during 1ms TTI) supports transmission of
rank-1 precoding (or, "beamforming") us- more than one information stream, or in terms
ing pre-defined 3GPP codebook (for 2 of matrices, the 2Tx 2Rx matrix channels con-
and 4 antennas), and any vendor-specific dition number and SINR are good enough. As a
beamforming when using UE-specific ref- rule of thumb, in a spatially uncorrelated chan-
erence signals (arbitrary number of base nel spatial multiplexing becomes useful when
station antennas). SINR > 10 dB. Looking at Fig. 3 one can see
that this requires very low network load for spa-
Spatial Multiplexing: This is what many tial multiplexing to work at cell edge, assuming
consider to be a true MIMO transmission that other-cell interference is uncoordinated.
scheme. With beamforming and diversity,
base station transmits a single stream of 4.2. Benefit of MIMO
information but uses the multiple anten- The benefits of different MIMO schemes in
nas to either reduce fading (diversity) or downlink are roughly as follows:
increase signal power (beamforming). On Transmit/receive diversity: Compared to 1Tx
the other hand, with 2Tx 2Rx spatial 1Rx the gain of 2Tx 2Rx is about 6 7 dB
multiplexing the idea is to transmit two due to following factors: i) transmit power is
parallel information streams over the same doubled by adding another amplifier (3dB); ii)
bandwidth, hence theoretically doubling average received signal power is doubled be-
the data rate and spectral efficiency. Both cause of two-antenna reception (3dB); iii) di-
open-loop (only channel rank and CQI versity from four signal paths brings additional
reported by UE) and closed-loop spatial gain which however strongly depends on the
multiplexing are supported (also precod- propagation environment (here pessimistically
ing matrix information reported by UE). assumed 0 1dB, higher gains are possible).
Delving slightly in implementation de- Rank-1 precoding: For slow-moving UEs the
tails, in LTE open-loop spatial multiplex- gain from closed-loop transmit diversity is 1
ing have been engineered in such a way 2 dB higher than with the open-loop trans-
that symbols in information streams are mit/receive diversity. For fast-moving mobiles
interleaved between the MIMO subchan- this improvement over diversity diminishes, or
nels. Thus, the average SINR experienced goes negative, since the CQI feedback cannot
by the transmitted symbols is the aver- track the channel fast enough.
age of the two MIMO subchannels SINRs. Spatial multiplexing: This scheme does not im-
In uplink, spatial multiplexing is not sup- prove link budget, but increases data rate. With
ported for a single UE, but two different two antennas and an ideal MIMO radio chan-
UEs are allowed to transmit at the same nel, the data rate would be doubled. In practice,
time; this is called multiuser-MIMO. gains are considerably smaller due to the fact
that for ideal operation the SINR of the two par-
3 Inthis paper, rank-1 precoding and beamforming are con- allel subchannels should be high enough to sup-
sidered synonymous. port the same modulation and coding scheme.
10 J. Salo et al
This is very rarely the case, and the second transmit antennas at 3 wavelength separation
stream must be transmitted at lower informa- (||); ii) two cross-polarized transmit antennas
tion bit rate. This point is further illustrated in at 0 deg and 90 deg angles (+). The dual-branch
the following subsection. UE antenna is a realistic terminal microstrip an-
tenna integrated in the terminal chassis, whose
4.3. Example of Measured MIMO Radio Chan- branch polarizations are not well-defined, as is
nel typically the case for small integrated antennas.
Spatial multiplexing transmission is feasible The figure shows the powers of the two MIMO
only at those time instants when the radio chan- subchannels as a function of travelled distance.
nel conditions are favorable. There exist a Roughly in the midpoint of the measurement
wealth of literature on the theory of MIMO com- route the UE enters line-of-sight and the sig-
munication systems, and the interested reader nal power of the stronger stream (1 ) increases.
is referred to the references. From radio plan- The second stream power behaves differently
ning point of view, the 2Tx 2Rx MIMO chan- for the two antenna setups. With the cross-
nel power response at any given time instant polarized antenna base station setup the sec-
can be written, on a subcarrier, as4 = 1 + 2 , ond stream (2 ) is about 15 dB weaker than the
where 1 and 2 are the power responses of stronger one. In contrast with the vertically po-
the first and second MIMO subchannels, respec- larized antennas the second stream is about 30
tively. Each of the subchannels carries one in- dB weaker. Thus, if the channel SINR is 20 dB,
formation stream. As with a normal non-MIMO with the cross-polarized configuration the first
channel, the powers of the subchannels experi- stream SINR would be almost 20dB while the
ence signal fading. If the power of the weaker second stream would experience about SINR
subchannel, say 2 , is very weak, the second in- 5 dB which would still allow fairly high bit rate
formation stream should not be transmitted at transmission over the second MIMO subchan-
that time instant, since it will either be buried nel. However, with the vertically polarized an-
in noise, or alternatively, from link adaptation tennas the second stream would be SINR 10
point of view, it is more spectrally efficient to dB, which would not support high-rate trans-
transmit one stream with higher-order modu- mission of the second stream.
lation and/or less channel coding. In either Fig. 8 illustrates the same measurement
case, usage of spatial multiplexing depends on routes using two different figures of merit,
the instantaneous channel conditions which are namely the total MIMO channel power re-
reported to, and tracked, by the base station. sponse and ratio of MIMO subchannel pow-
When the second subchannel is weak, the chan- ers, 21 . From the upper subplot it can be seen
nel is said to have "rank one", and spatial multi- that the total power responses of the two an-
plexing is not used5 . tenna setups are slightly different. Vertically
Fig. 7 presents an example of a narrow- polarized configuration has almost negligibly
band measurement of a 2Tx 2Rx channel in higher received power in the line-of-sight, while
an urban environment at 2.1 GHz carrier fre- the cross-polarized configuration, in turn, has
qurency. Two base station antenna configu- slightly better power response in non-line-of-
rations are shown: i) two vertically polarized sight. From the lower subplot we note that the
cross-polarized antenna setup has advantage in
4 The symbol is used here for historical reasons, since the
terms of the second subchannel power in line-of-
MIMO subchannel power is related to the eigenvalues of the
MIMO radio channel.
sight conditions; the second subchannel is about
5 Mathematically, the rank of the 2Tx 2Rx channel is prac- 10 dB weaker than the first, compared to the 30
tically always two, so this terminology is strictly speaking a or so dBs for the vertically polarized case.
misnomer.
Practical Introduction to LTE Radio Planning 11
subchannel power, dB
10
2
subchannel power, dB
10
pact on the spatial multiplexing perfor-
20
mance in two respects: total received sig-
30
nal and spatial multiplexing gain.
40
0
The results indicate that cross-polarized base 5
vpol (||)
xpol (+)
station antenna configuration should be favored 10
30
paper illustrated by means of a single measure- 5 10
distance, meters
15 20
ment example, similar conclusions have been ratio of MIMO subchannel powers, vpol versus xpol
50
drawn from large channel measurement cam-
40
paigns reported in literature [5].
1 / 2, dB
30
20
5. RADIO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT FEA-
10
TURES
0
5 10 15 20
distance, meters
So far, we have discussed a simple "baseline"
LTE radio configuration, assuming fully ran-
dom (uncoordinated) interference and no spe-
cial radio resource management features. The
LTE radio interface specification Release 8 sup- Figure 8. Example of measured MIMO radio
ports several advanced air interface functional- channel, total channel power response and sub-
ities that potentially improve network perfor- channel power ratio for two base station antenna
mance in certain environments. These are ex- configurations.
plained in the following.
12 J. Salo et al
power control schemes that attempt to compen- UE cannot measure and report two cells with
sate path loss to the full extent allowed by the the same PCI. This part of the PCI allocation
UE transmit power. The benefit of the fractional should not pose a problem since there are 504
scheme is that, due to reduction in UE trans- PCIs defined.
mit power, network-level interference is reduced The second, perhaps less obvious, purpose of
and overall UL throughput is increased. This the PCI is to serve as a resource allocator param-
improvement is at the expense of reduction in eter for downlink and uplink Reference Signals
cell edge UL throughput. For each optimization (RS).
goal - maximizing cell edge throughput or net- DL Reference Signal: Downlink reference sym-
work throughput - there exist an optimum op- bols ("LTE pilot signal") are allocated in a time-
timum power control parameter set. For early frequency grid as shown in Fig. 9. The figure
system simulation examples, see [7]. illustrates three frame-synchronized cells with
PCIs 9, 10, and 11. For example, these could
6. INTRODUCTION TO RADIO PARAME- represent different cells of the same eNB site6 .
TER PLANNING In time domain the RS are always transmitted
in the same OFDM symbol. However, in fre-
The three most important tasks in LTE pre- quency domain each cell has a different shift
launch radio parameter planning are: i) Phys- determined by modulo-3 of the PCI, denoted
ical Cell Identity (PCI) allocation, ii) Physical PCI mod3. In Fig. 9, cell #1 has PCI mod3 =
Random Access Channel (PRACH) parameter 0, cell #2 has PCI mod3 = 1, while cell #3
planning, and iii) uplink reference signal se- has PCI mod3 = 2. With this PCI allocation,
quence planning. Obviously, there are numer- the RS of different cells do not overlap in fre-
ous other types of air interface parameters that quency, which results in less interference on
can be tuned in LTE, such as UL power control UE channel estimation. If neighbouring sites
and handover thresholds. However, the three are frame-synchronized (e.g., using GPS), or the
tasks picked out above are the ones that must frame timing offset between sites is known, the
be planned before network launch, while the re- PCI allocation should also be coordinated be-
maining ones can arguably be optimized also af- tween neighbouring sites, which brings addi-
ter launch, provided that reasonable default val- tional complexity in the allocation process. On
ues are available. In the following, we briefly re- the other hand, if the neighbouring sites are not
view the basics of the three main pre-launch pa- frame-synchronized or the frame timing offset is
rameter design tasks. More detailed treatment not known (i.e., random), one cannot coordinate
of parameter optimization and planning will be PCI allocation between sites.
a topic of a separate exposition. It should be noted that assigning PCIs as
shown in Fig. 9 results in RS overlapping with
6.1. PCI planning the control and data Resource Elements of the
In LTE, Physical Cell Identity (PCI) allocation neighbouring cells. Therefore, a design choice
is a task somewhat similar to scrambling code must be made between RSRS interference and
allocation in WCDMA. PCI is encoded in the RSPDSCH/PDCCH intererence. The current
physical layer synchronization signal transmis- engineering consensus seems to be that the lat-
sion and is used by the UE for neighbour cell ter choice is favoured, due to the fact that if
handover measurement reports. Hence, as in two frame-synchronized cells have the same
WCDMA, the PCI should uniquely identify the 6
Note that Fig. 9 shows transmission of both transmit anten-
neighbouring cell to the serving eNB, within a
nas in the same grid, to save space. Frame synchronization
certain geographical area. Consequently, PCI in this context means that the DL transmission of a radio
reuse distance should be large enough so that frame starts at the same time instant in all three cells.
14 J. Salo et al
Figure 9. Location of Reference Symbols within one PRB for different PCIs. Frame-synchronized cells
shown.
PCImod3, the additional drawback is that their tentially interfering cells is different. This is be-
Primary Synchronization Signals will interfere cause in the simplest scheme the DM RS base se-
with each other, causing problems in cell search quence index is equal to u =PCI mod30, where
and handover measurements. u = 0 . . . 29 is the base sequence index. An ex-
UL Reference Signal: LTE uplink shared data ample of this simple PCI-based DM RS sequence
channel (PUSCH) carries Demodulation Refer- allocation scheme is shown in Fig. 10. In prac-
ence Signal (DM RS). Optionally also Sound- tical network deployments this simple planning
ing Reference Signal is transmitted in the up- criterion cannot be always fulfilled. As a remedy
link. The uplink DM RS are constructed from to such a case, there are additional sequence al-
Zadoff-Chu sequences which are divided into location schemes built-in in the 3GPP specifica-
30 groups. Roughly, this means that for a given tion, most notably a static base sequence index
number of PRBs allocated in the uplink there offset parameter, DM RS cyclic shift planning,
are 30 different base sequences that can be used and pseudo-random base sequence hopping ("u-
as the reference signal7 . The cross-correlation hopping"). These will be discussed next.
between the base sequences is on average low,
which is beneficial from inter-cell interference
point of view. It follows that the planning re- 6.2. UL Reference Signal sequence planning
quirement is that the neighbouring cells should The simple PCI-based based sequence uplink
be allocated different base sequences. The sim- DM RS allocation scheme from the previous sec-
plest method is to ensure that PCI mod 30 of po- tion may be difficult to plan since the same base
7
sequence is reused in every 30th cell, which may
There are actually two groups of 30 sequences defined
lead to insufficient cell separation.
for PRB allocations of 6 or more. These can be pseudo-
randomly alternated. However, this option is not considered There are three options to reduce uplink inter-
in this paper. cell interference in such cases:
Practical Introduction to LTE Radio Planning 15
Figure 10. Simple PCI-based uplink DM RS allocation scheme. Different base sequence u allocated to
every cell based on PCImod30, every cell has ss = 0.
Figure 11. Example of how the parameter ss can a base sequence collision between two cells. The
indoor cell has been allocated PCI=30 which would result in u = 0 if ss = 0, hence creating UL
interference with cell PCI=0. Setting ss = 29 gives u = (30 + 29) mod 30 = 29 instead.
16 J. Salo et al
Figure 12. Example of u-hopping. Cluster #1 has hopping-pattern = 0 and cluster #2 has hopping-
pattern = 1. Sequence offset ss = 0 for all cells. Systematic base sequence collisions within a group
are avoided within a group. Random base sequence collisions are possible in the cluster border.
Figure 13. Example of cyclic shift planning. Cells of the same site are allocated the same base sequence
u using the offset parameter ss . Inter-cell interference between cells of the same site is mitigated by
setting different cell-specific cyclic shift (cs) for cells of a site.
Practical Introduction to LTE Radio Planning 17
Bypass the simple PCI-based base alloca- patterns defined since there are 504 PCIs de-
tion scheme by explicitly defining the base fined, i.e., = 0 . . . 16. A foreseen method
sequence used in the cell. This brings ad- of PCI planning, where near-by cells are as-
ditional flexibility to base sequence allo- signed near-by PCI values, results in grouping
cation, and effectively decouples the PCI of cells into "clusters-of-30", where within each
planning from uplink DM RS base se- cell cluster the same hopping-pattern is used. To
quence planning. prevent systematic collisions, static part of the
sequence group assignment, ( PCI + ss ) mod
The base sequence u can change pseudo- 30, should be different, especially for frame-
randomly for every 0.5ms time slot. synchronized cells. At the border of two cell
This planning option randomizes base se- clusters having different , random sequence
quence collisions and averages inter-cell group collisions are possible since two different
interference. hopping patterns are utilized. An example of
Different cyclic shifts of a ZC sequence are this planning scheme is shown in Fig. 12.
orthogonal. This can be utilized by assign- Cyclic shift planning: So far we have consid-
ing a different cyclic shift on two cells that ered only how to reduce inter-cell interference
use the same base sequence u. The cell- by assigning different base sequences to every
specific static cyclic shift is broadcasted on neighbouring cell. Another interference reduc-
BCCH. tion method follows from the fact that ZC se-
quences have the useful property that two dif-
Defining u independently from PCI: The simplest ferent cyclic shifts of the same base sequence are
scheme assigns the base sequence index u to a orthogonal9 . Therefore, if a pair of cells have
cell as modulo-30 of PCI. Optionally, the base been allocated the same base sequence u, inter-
sequence can be assigned to a cell as cell interference can be reduced by assigning a
different cyclic shift to the cells. This scheme can
u = ( PCI + ss ) mod 30 , be applied to cells of one site as shown in Fig.
13. Other applications, tangential to our present
where ss = 0 . . . 29 is an offset parameter discussion, are uplink multi-user MIMO (where
signalled on BCCH. In the simple PCI-based each UE uses a different cyclic shift) and, in LTE-
scheme ss = 0. With ss it is possible to avoid A, uplink single-user MIMO (where each UE
collisions in cells that would otherwise use the transmit antenna uses a different cyclic shift), or
same u due to PCI allocation. An example of ss a combination of the two. It should be noted
planning is shown in Fig. 11. that cyclic shift planning can also be combined
Pseudo-random u-hopping: If u-hopping is acti- with the other two schemes discussed in this
vated, the base sequence used in the cell changes section.
at every time slot in a pseudo-random fashion.
The index of base sequence in time slot n 8 6.3. PRACH parameter planning
The random access procedure in LTE uplink
un = (n + PCI + ss ) mod 30 , begins when UE transmits a preamble to the
eNB. The specific preamble is selected randomly
where n = 0 . . . 29 is pseudo-random integer by UE from a pre-defined set of 64 Zadoff-Chu
defined by the hopping-pattern. The hopping sequences. To avoid call setup anomalies, each
pattern defined used in a cell is defined by the cell (within a reuse distance) has its own unique
index = PCI
30 . Thus, there are 17 u-hopping set of 64 preambles, and the information of the
8 There are 20 time slots in a radio frame. The hopping pat- 9 Cyclicshifts of extended ZC sequences used in uplink DM
tern is re-initialized at the beginning of every radio frame. RS are not orthogonal, however.
18 J. Salo et al
Figure 14. Example of root sequence allocation for different cells. Four sequences per cell are allocated,
PRACH configuration index = 8, see Table 3.
specific set to use in the cell is broadcasted on quired per cell, for a given random access ra-
BCCH. The preamble sequence allocation de- dius. One can see that a cell requires five ZC
pends on cell range: for example, if one (un- sequences per cell for up to 7.3km radius, which
realistically) requires that all cells must be ac- is typically sufficient for urban and suburban
cessible from 100km away then there would be macro cells. This results in sequence reuse fac-
only a total of 839 preamble sequences available. tor of at least 839/5 167 cells, hence allows
As each cell must have exactly 64 preambles, for easy planning process. Example of root se-
the total number of cells within a reuse distance quence allocation is shown in Fig. 14. The
would then be only 839 64 13, and in this case point to notice here is that root sequence indices
each cell consumes 64 ZC sequences (one full of cells must not overlap within the reuse dis-
ZC sequence per preamble) out of the total of tance10 . As for typical scenarios there are plenty
839 ZC sequences available for PRACH. More of ZC sequences available, for safety margin and
sequences can be generated if the "random ac- ease of planning one can overdimension the ran-
cess radius" of cells is dimensioned more real- dom access radius of the cells in a given plan-
istically; continuing the example, if maximum ning region, to simplify allocation. In the exam-
random access cell range is chosen as 1km, one ple of Fig. 14 each cell consumes four sequences,
ZC sequence generates 64 preambles, instead corresponding to maximum radius of 5.4km for
of the one preamble in the 100km case. Sum- every cell.
marizing, the PRACH parameter planning task If root sequences used in neighbouring cells
consists of deciding i) the maximum cell range overlap, the transmitted preamble may be de-
for random access, and ii) allocating the ZC se-
quences to cells. 10 Toreduce signalling load, only the index of the first root
Table 3 lists the number of ZC sequences re- sequence used in the cell and the PRACH configuration in-
dex is transmitted on BCCH.
Practical Introduction to LTE Radio Planning 19
tected in multiple cells. The drawback are the measurement example. Finally, some advanced
"ghost" preambles which consequently result radio resource management features and de-
in unnecessary PDCCH and PUSCH resource tailed radio parameter planning tasks were in-
reservation in those cells that whose random ac- troduced.
cess responses the UE chooses to neglect11 .
REFERENCES