ZTEs WCDMA Radio Resource Management Strategy

1 Power Control
The WCDMA system is limited by interference. Because of the "Near-Far Effect", the system capacity
is limited by the interference between the mobile stations and the Node Bs. As a result, if each
mobile stations signal stays at the minimal S/N ratio required to maintain the QoS when arriving at
the Node B, the WCDMA system capacity would attain its maximum. Power control is designed to
overcome the "Near-Far Effect". Power Control evaluates the energy or the S/N ratio of the received
signal, and compensates the radio channel fading in times of need. It not only maintains the
communication quality, but also averts generation of extra interference for the system. There are
three types of power control in the WCDMA system: open loop power control, inner loop power
control, and outer loop power control.
1.1 Open Loop Power Control
The basic principle of open loop power control is: assuming the uplink loss and downlink loss are
similar, the mobile terminal acquires the system transmission power from the system broadcast
message whereby it measures the actual received power, works out the link loss, and then gets the
uplink transmission power. The asymmetry of the uplink & downlink are not considered in the open
loop power control, so the power control accuracy cannot be ensured.

Figure 1 shows the results of open loop power control simulation test of ZTEs WCDMA system.
We can see the open loop power control significantly converges to the initial transmission power of
the system, and effectively reduces the impact on the system loads.
1.2 Inner Loop Power Control
Inner loop power control is a kind of closed loop power control. In open loop power control, the
adjustment of mobile terminal transmission power is based on the signal intensity of the forward
channels. However, since the uplink and downlink are unrelated to each other, the open loop power
control is just a rough adjustment. If we want to have power compensation of the fast-fading
channels, we need use inner loop power control, also called fast power control sometimes.

Inner loop power control falls into two categories: inner loop uplink power control, and inner loop
downlink power control. In uplink inner loop power control, the mobile terminal adjusts its own
transmission power according to the power control instructions sent by the Node B. The Node B then
measures and compares the S/N ratio of its received signal with the correspondent S/N ratio
threshold. If the measured S/N ratio is too low, it will request the mobile terminal to increase the
transmission power; otherwise, it will request the mobile terminal to decrease the transmission
power.
Node Bs power control instruction is sent in the power control byte. If the power control byte is 0, it
implies that the mobile terminal is requested to increase the transmission power; if the power control
byte is 1, the mobile terminal is requested to decrease the transmission power. The power adjustment
step length can be set as 1 dB or 2 dB according to different algorithms.
The frequency of inner loop power control is as high as 1.5 kHz. Compared with CDMA or GSM,
the WCDMA power control effect is more considerable.
A large number of simulation tests and on-site operations have verified the excellent power control
performance of ZTEs Radio Network Controller (RNC): It can control the power fluctuations within
0.25 dB, and thus increase the system performance by 10-15%.
1.3 Outer Loop Power Control
Outer loop power control is a kind of slow closed loop power control. It selects an appropriate target
control value for inner loop power control, so as to ensure the desired communication quality. The
purpose of outer loop power control is to have an appropriate S/N ratio: neither too high, nor too
low. If it is too high, the system capacity will be wasted; if it is too low, the communication quality
will deteriorate. Since inner loop power control is used in the uplink & downlink of the WCDMA
system, corresponding outer loop power control needs to be applied in both uplink and downlink.
Outer loop power control is the power control in the physical layer. It adjusts the target S/N ratio of
inner loop power control by checking Block Error Rate (BLER) of the received data through Cyclic
Redundancy Code (CRC) check and comparing it with the target value.
The basic flow of outer loop power control is shown in Figure 2.

Outer loop power control can make the system capacity reach its theoretical maximum while
ensuring the communication quality.

2 Handoff Control

Handoff control is the basic function of the WCDMA system, and is an important step to guarantee
QoS. When the call quality decreases because the mobile terminal moves or the radio environment
changes, the call should be transferred from the original radio channel to a new idle channel, so as to
maintain the communication process and quality.
There is soft handoff and hard handoff in the WCDMA system. Soft handoff is the real seamless
handoff performed in the same frequency, and in the handoff process, the mobile terminal is
connected with several Node Bs. In hard handoff, the connection between the mobile terminal and
the original Node B is disconnected before the mobile terminal is connected to the new Node B.
Usually, the new connection cannot be established immediately after the original connection is
disconnected, and as a result, hard handoff impairs the call quality of the system.
ZTEs WCDMA system uses the following strategic algorithm for handoff control:

Try to avoid the occurrence of handoff, especially handoff between systems. Since soft
handoff consumes a lot of system resource, the handoff rate should be controlled appropriately.

Use soft handoff and softer handoff in priority. Soft handoff should be used in priority for
better communication quality it guarantees.

One-way handoff is used for handoff from 3G to 2G, which effectively prevents the PingPong Effect.

For handoff from 2G to 3G, cell reselection is used to return to the WCDMA network.

3 Load Control
If the system becomes unstable when the cell load exceeds the load threshold, we need load control
for the system. The basic idea of load control is to connect as many services as possible while
ensuring the stable running of the system, so as to increase the system effectiveness.
When the system load approximates or exceeds the system threshold, the load control module will
start the load control:

Downlink load control: refuse to accept the mobile terminals instruction to increase the
downlink power;

Uplink load control: reduce the Eb/No target used in uplink fast power control;

Reduce the data throughput of the packet service, mainly by reducing the service rate;

Handoff to other WCDMA carrier frequencies;

Handoff to other Radio Access Technology (RAT) systems;

Reduce real-time service rate, like the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech codec;

Drop calls.
Actually, the first two measures are implemented on the Node B: reduce the received Eb/No target
in the channels to reduce the transmission power of the User Equipment (UE), and thus reduce the
total received power of the Node B to release the uplink load pressure; If the actual transmission
power approximates the allowed maximal transmission power, reduce the transmission power of the
downlink channels to screen the requirement to increase power. For Circuit Switching (CS) domain
services, service rate decrease will impair the communication quality. For Packet Switching (PS)
domain services, the subscriber will sense the change of the data transmission rate. The QoS is
sacrificed for the stability of the system.
Figure 3 shows the performance simulation of the AMR speech codec dynamic adjustment under
load control. We can see that through load control, the system coverage gain can be increased by
around 2.2 dB, and the coverage area can be increased by around 30%.

4 Admission Control
If the connections of new subscribers are not limited, the air interfaces will be overloaded, the actual
coverage of a cell will diminish significantly, and the quality of connected services cannot be
guaranteed. As a result, we need to check whether the addition of a new subscriber will impair the
network performance before admitting the connection request. The module that performs that
function is the admission control module.
In WCDMA admission control, there are two algorithms: admission control based on power, and
admission control based on throughput:

Admission control based on power

Uplink admission control based on power can be denoted in the following formula:
I Total_old +I >I Threshold
(I : Node B receiving power)

Uplink:
PTotal_old +P >P Threshold
(P : Node B transmission power)
Admission control based on throughput

Uplink admission control based on throughput can be denoted in the following formula:
UL+L > UL_Threshold
Uplink:
DL+L > DL_Threshold
DL and DL are respectively the load factors of uplink and downlink before the admission. L is
the load factor of new subscribers.
In ZTEs WCDMA system, the admission control falls into two categories: new subscriber
admission and handoff admission. Handoff admission is prior to new subscriber admission. During
testing, the admitted subscribers in 12.2 kb/s could reach as high as 123, approximately the
theoretical limit.

5 Dynamic Channel Allocation

Dynamic Channel Allocation (DCA) has two phases: channel selection in calling, and channel
reselection for QoS after the call is established. As a result, dynamic channel allocation has two
aspects in implementation:
When a new call is started, the system will judge according to the admission algorithm

whether to admit the call. If it is allowed to be admitted, the system will allocate an appropriate
channel to the subscriber according to the condition of the available channel resources at that
moment;
In the communication process, when the radio environment deteriorates or the subscribers

channel resource needs changes, the system will adjust the radio channels to ensure reliable service
quality.
For the dynamic channel allocation, we mainly consider two aspects: usage and complexity. By
considering usage, we try to reduce the amount of code resources blocked in allocation. By
considering complexity, we try to reduce the complexity in code resource allocation, and reduce the
systems allocation consumption. For example, if the load of a single code C4,1 is equivalent to that
of a double code (C8,1, C8,2), but multi-code transmission will increase the system complexity, we
should try to avoid multi-code transmission.
While testing ZTEs WCDMA system, we found that using the dynamic channel allocation
algorithm can effectively and dynamically allocate the bandwidth according to the actual traffic
change. When the traffic is low, we can reduce the bandwidth to increase the usage of the radio

resources; when the traffic is high, we can increase the bandwidth to transmit the data in the buffer
as soon as possible to increase the service quality.
RRM plays a very important role in the WCDMA system, and is directly related to the system
performance. ZTE integrates many advanced algorithms and ideas in the RRM for the WCDMA
system, which results in the excellent performance in effective coverage, capacity, QoS, and
bandwidth usage.