Load Balancing Effect of Inter-Frequency Handover

with Pilot Power Tuning in UTRAN

Tsuyoshi KASHIMA, Houtao ZHU
Nokia Research Center
Tokyo, Japan
Tsuyoshi.Kashima@nokia.com, Houtao.Zhu@nokia.com
AbstractLoad balancing is an important technique in radio
resource managements (RRM). In future, when several
frequencies are required to cover increasing number of users and
increasing amount of traffic, inter-frequency handover (IFHO)
will perform an important role in load balancing between
frequencies. Meanwhile, there is usually geographical load
imbalance in real network and changing coverage by tuning
common pilot channel (CPICH) power can mitigate this
geographical load imbalance. In this context, we evaluated the
RRM techniques combining IFHO and CPICH power tuning for
balancing load and for achieving better performance by using a
dynamic WCDMA simulator. First, we compare the IFHO
performances in terms of the IFHO trigger types. In this
comparison, we will show the CPICH EcNo (code energy divided
by noise energy)-triggered IFHO can achieve 30-40 % downlink
(DL) load decreases in hotspot area. Next, we analyze the relation
between the IFHO and CPICH power tuning, by comparing the
effect of CPICH power tuning with and without IFHO function
and show its performance by using the simulator. Then finally,
we will propose an example procedure to utilize the combination
of IFHO and CPICH power tuning based on the revealed relation
between them.
Keywords: WCDMA, Inter-frequency handover, CPICH power
tuning, Pilot power tuning, Radio resource management, Load
balancing, Dynamic simulator

I.

BACKGROUNDS

In this paper, the combination of IFHO and CPICH power

tuning technique will be discussed. For that purpose, the
backgrounds of IFHO function and CPICH power tuning are
separately explained in this section.
A. Inter-Frequency Handover
One advantage of IFHO is the trunking gain, which can be
obtained from the load balancing between different
frequencies. One main disadvantage of IFHO is the
compressed mode, in which UE abandons its transmission and
reception periodically to measure another frequency. This
mode reduces the performance of power control [5], and leads
to the increase of interference.
In terms of IFHO trigger, there are several choices, such as
whether to use uplink (UL) trigger or downlink (DL) trigger,
and whether to use code power or EcNo (code energy divided
by noise energy). The comparison of CPICH EcNo and RSCP
(Received Signal Code Power) has been already discussed both

in soft handover (SHO) case and in IFHO case. In SHO, a

paper [6] concludes that CPICH EcNo achieves better
performance in outage probability and call blocking probability.
A paper [7] studies IFHO in hierarchical-cell-structuredWCDMA network and concludes that RSCP outperforms
EcNo in call dropping probability and blocking probability.
B. CPICH power tuning
CPICH power tuning has been investigated as one of the
techniques to control the cell coverage and to achieve the load
balancing [1][2]. By reducing the CPICH power, the operator
can reduce the cell coverage and cell load. In addition to that,
the reduction of CPICH power directly leads to the decrease of
DL load. According to [4], the adjustment of CPICH power can
improve the network stability and call quality by reducing the
BTS power. Generally speaking, the impact of CPICH power
tuning is broad. For example, when reducing CPICH power,
the problem of coverage hole needs to be considered. Then the
paper [3] uses cost functions to evaluate the whole
performance.
II.

ANALYTICAL APPROACH

Analytical approach can provide an idea about what is

expected. It is possible to apply the following discussion to
both UL and DL. Assume that there are two frequencies, freq1
and freq2 in the system. The definition of UL load UL and DL
load DL in this paper are as follows:

UL = ( Interferenceown + Interferenceother ) Pr x total ,

DL = Ptx total Ptx max .

(1)

Those loads fluctuate due to fading, noise, mobility, traffic,

system action, and other factors. In addition, if there are packet
users, the fluctuation of the load becomes larger. Thus, loads
need to be analyzed as statistical values. Assuming that freq1
and freq 2 are stochastic variables, freq1 and freq 2 are the mean
values, freq1 and freq 2 are the standard deviation of the
loads on freq1 and freq2. If there is no IFHO function or no
load balancing between freq1 and freq2, those load
distributions do not change. If there is IFHO function and, if
the perfect load balancing effect is available, the stochastic
variables are balanced to the same value as,

0-7803-8256-0/04/$20.00 (C) 2004 IEEE

 = ( freq1 + freq 2 ) 2 .

(2)

Then, the mean value and the standard deviation can be

easily calculated as

= ( freq1 + freq 2 ) 2 ,
=

2
freq1

+ freq 2

(3)
2.

hotspot

(4)

freq.2

Thus, if the frequency 1 and frequency 2 originally have the

same statistical distribution, in other words, if
freq1 = freq 2 freq and freq1 = freq 2 freq , the above
equation can be written as,

= freq ,
= freq

freq.1

(5)

2.

(6)

These equations indicate that thanks to the load balancing

effect of IFHO, the fluctuation of the load can be suppressed.
As a result, the system becomes more stable, and the
probability that the system goes into the overload state
becomes lower. Therefore the system can accommodate more
users, and the capacity becomes more than double. This is
called as a trunking gain. It can be concluded that the important
thing to achieve a trunking gain is how perfect the load
balancing is performed.
From the above analysis, it becomes clear that IFHO can
provide not only the trunking gain but also the stability of the
load. Usually, when tuning CPICH power, too high
interference and coverage hole need to be considered. If the
load is more stable, the probability that the system goes into
those bad conditions becomes lower. Then the range that the
CPICH power can be changed becomes larger. From this
consideration, at least, it is expected that using the combination
of IFHO and CPICH power tuning can provide better load
balancing ability than using only one of them.

Figure 1. cell configuration and hotspot area

B. Simulation results
Because CPICH power tuning has a direct impact on the
DL IFHO triggers and our final target is developing a
controllable combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning,
DL IFHO triggers are more important than UL IFHO trigger in
this research. Then, we compared the performances between
CPICH RSCP and CPICH EcNo triggers. Note that in the
following, the definition of IFHO rate used in figures is
IFHO rate =number of IFHO / number of calls.

Figure 2 and Figure 3 show call success rate (CSR). In

Figure 4 showing DL loads, Cell 0, 1, 2, 7, 8 and Cell 19, 20,
26, 27, 30 are in different frequencies and, Cell 7 and Cell 20
are two hotspot-closest cells. The threshold of IFHO trigger
can control IFHO rate.
100
99
98

A. Simulation condition
Different from the paper [7], we used the uniformly
distributed two-layered macro cell configuration shown in
Figure 1. Both frequencies have almost 100 % coverage by
using two kinds of BTSs, which are 120-degree-separated 3sector BTS and at the same location 60-degree-rotated to each
other. This is for fully utilizing the available frequencies and
for simplifying evaluation. Terminals generate calls by
randomly choosing either frequency 1 or frequency 2 with
equal probabilities for each frequency. They move at 20 km/h
and, in addition, there is a hotspot, at which user density is
higher than other area. The other dynamic simulator settings
are listed in table 1 in the last page of this paper. Our
evaluations are done on ten sectors surrounding this hotspot,
namely, sectors 0, 1, 2, 7, 8, 19, 20, 26, 27 and 30 in Figure 1.

In simulations, the negative effect of compressed mode is

not included due to the limitation of the simulator. However,
that effect will be evaluated manually in the analysis section of
this paper using the values from the literature [8].

96

U L , cp ich E cN o

95

D L , cp ich E cN o

94

U L , cp ich R S C P

93

D L , cp ich R S C P

92
91
0

0 .1

0 .2

0 .3

0 .4

0 .5

0 .6

IFH O r a te

Figure 2. speech CSR for DL IFHO triggers

10 0
98
96
CSR [%]

IFHO EVALUATION BY DYNAMIC SIMULATIONS

CSR [%]

97

III.

(7)

U L, c pic h E cN o

94

D L, c pic h E cN o
92

U L, c pic h R S C P
D L, c pic h R S C P

90
88
0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0 .6

IF H O rate

Figure 3. packet CSR for DL IFHO triggers

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0.8
Cell 0
Cell 1

0.7

Cell 7
Cell 8

0.5

Cell 19
Cell 20

0.4

Cell 26
0.3

Cell 27
Cell 30

0.2
0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

IFHO rate

Figure 4. DL load balancing effect of CPICH EcNo-triggered IFHO

The simulation results reveal that

1.

CSR in Figure 2 and Figure 3, packet delay, and

throughput (not shown) are better with higher IFHO.
The different behavior between UL and DL is
discussed in the next subsection.

2.

Both DL IFHO triggers improve the DL performance

better than UL performance. One reason is that DL
IFHO trigger is based on DL load imbalance and UL
only receives an indirect benefit from this DLtriggered IFHO. Detail discussion is done in the next
sub section.

3.

CPICH EcNo trigger achieves better performance

than CPICH RSCP trigger. Figure 2 and Figure 3
show that difference of achievable performance. In
addition, comparing to the load balancing effect of
CPICH EcNo triggered IFHO in Figure 4, the load
balancing effect of RSCP triggered IFHO is smaller.
This is because EcNo includes the impact of
interference in the trigger decision and RSCP does
not. As an example, this difference can be seen also
in the reaction to the hotspot, or load imbalance. In
IFHO occurrence distribution map, although CPICH
EcNo triggered IFHO is concentrated on hotspot area,
CPICH RSCP triggered IFHO scattered indifferent to
hotspot.

4.

CPICH EcNo trigger achieves 30-40 % DL load

decrease as shown in Figure 4. The paper [7]
concludes that CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO
achieves better performance than CPICH EcNotriggered IFHO, which is opposite to our conclusion
from these results. There are two main reasons for
this difference. One reason is the difference of the
performance indicator used for the evaluation. The
paper [7] only mentions the call block and call drop,
although in our simulation cases, call blocks and call
drops are almost zero because the coverage is almost
100 % and load is not too high. Then, we used other
indicators, such as load, CSR, throughput, and packet
delay. The other reason is the difference of the cell
configuration. They used hierarchical structure and
our simulations use uniformly-distributed cell
structure.

According to the literature [8], the negative effect of

compressed mode can be estimated to be roughly 20 % if all
users are in compressed mode and 2 % if a tenth of users are in
compressed mode. Therefore, we can conclude that 30-40 %
gain in DL capacity is larger than the negative effect of

C. Difference between UL and DL performance

As explained in the previous subsection, the DL
performance is improved better than UL performance. In some
cases, UL performance becomes worse in too high IFHO rate
region. Even using UL IFHO triggers such as UL transmission
power and UL quality, DL performance is also improved and
UL performance has a peak at a certain IFHO rate. This
different behavior of UL and DL performance can be explained
from the behavior of UL load. Figure 5 shows the UL load for
CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO case. The UL load increases if
the IFHO rate is over 10 %. In CPICH EcNo-triggered IFHO
case, the UL load is almost stable or slightly increases. One
important lesson from those results is that even without the
negative effect of compressed mode, too high IFHO rate could
cause higher load and worse performance in UL.

Next, we explain the increase of UL load shown in Figure 5.

Generally speaking, handovers done at improper timing are
located far from the middle point between two BTSs (base
transceiver stations), in other words handover is done too early
or too late when mobiles move. This kind of improper timing
handover causes higher UL interference to the closer BTSs
because the UE (user equipment) is connected to the farther
BTS. If the IFHO threshold is too loose and IFHO rate is too
high, many improper timing handovers would occur. This can
cause the UL load increase and worsen the UL performance.
This discussion can be also applied to DL. However, because
generally UL suffers from interference more than DL in
CDMA network, UL load increase is more serious in the
results.
IFHO AND CPICH POWER TUNING

IV.

A. Simulation condition
To evaluate the combination of IFHO and CPICH power
tuning in load balancing, we choose CPICH EcNo trigger. One
reason for this choice is that CPICH EcNo trigger proves to be
a better trigger in the performance analysis done in section II.
The other reason is that CPICH EcNo trigger has better load
balancing ability. This can be seen in the results that CPICH
EcNo triggered-IFHO occurrence is concentrated on hotspot.
0.9
Cell 0

0.85

Cell 1

0.8
UL loading

DL loading

Cell 2
0.6

compressed mode and the gain is still positive. In addition,

because IFHO rate determines the negative effect of
compressed mode and the type of IFHO triggers does not have
any influences on that negative effect, our conclusion, that
EcNo trigger is better, is still valid, even if the compressed
mode is considered.

Cell 2

0.75

Cell 7

0.7

Cell 8

0.65

Cell 19

0.6

Cell 20

0.55

Cell 26

0.5

Cell 27

0.45

Cell 30

0.4
0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

IFHO rate

Figure 5. UL load balancing effect of CPICH RSCP-triggered IFHO

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DL loading / (7 20)/ no IFHO

0.8

0.8
0.7
DL loading

IFHO rate

Cell 1
Cell 2

0.6

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2

Cell 19

0.3

Cell 20

0.2

Cell 26

1.5

2.5

Cell 8

0.4

0.1
1

Cell 7

0.5

0.1

Cell 27
Cell 30
1

1.5

Generally speaking, the purpose of CPICH tuning is to

mitigate the load imbalance, such as the situation occurring in
hotspot area, by changing the coverage of each sector defined
by CPICH power. Then in this simulation experiment, we
changed the CPICH power of two hotspot-closest sectors,
which are sector 7 and sector 20 in Figure 1, from 1 W to 3 W
keeping both CPICH powers to be the same. Other simulation
settings are the same as explained in subsection II-A.
As shown in Figure 6, CPICH power tuning has a large
impact on IFHO rate triggered by EcNo. This is because by
decreasing the CPICH power and reducing coverage of
hotspot-closest sectors, other sectors than sector 7 and sector
20 need to cover the hotspot. This situation causes more IFHO
around hotspot area. This CPICH power tuning simulation is
done with very low IFHO threshold, namely with very high
IFHO rate. The rightmost point in Figure 4 corresponds to 2 W
in Figure 6.
B. Comparison between with IFHO and without IFHO
To clarify the effect of IFHO on the performance of CPICH
power tuning, we first show the DL load behavior caused by
the change of CPICH power with and without IFHO function.
Figure 7 shows the result with IFHO and Figure 8 shows the
result without IFHO. The comparison of those results suggests
that the CPICH power tuning with IFHO has better load
balancing ability than without IFHO. This results can be
explained as follows. Without IFHO, when decreasing CPICH
power, other cells, which need to cover that hotspot area,
should be of the same frequency. With IFHO, covering cells
can be of any frequencies. Then this means that the distance
between hotspot and these alternative cells covering the hotspot
is larger without IFHO than with IFHO. Then, without IFHO,
the transmission powers in UL and DL are larger, causing the
increase of loads.
0.7

Figure 9 shows the UL load behavior, which does not have

any clear tendency and is almost stable. Even without IFHO,
the UL load behaves in almost the same way. In this sense,
performance analysis should be on DL.

Cell 8

0.3

Cell 19

0.2

Cell 20
Cell 26

0.1

Cell 27

0
1.5

2.5

Cell 30

Cell 0
Cell 1

0.7

Cell 2
Cell 7

U L lo a d in g / (7 =2 0 )/ c p ic h E c N o 12

0.8
0.75

Cell 2

0.65
UL loading

DL loading

C. Analysis on CPICH power tuning with IFHO

The comparison between with IFHO and without IFHO
shows that the CPICH power tuning is easier and more
effective with IFHO than without IFHO. Then hereafter, the
analysis is done only for the CPICH power tuning with IFHO
function. In Figure 7, the DL load of hotspot-closest cells can
be decreased to the same level as the load of other cells by
reducing their CPICH power to 1 W. This load decrease is very
clear and the rule to achieve this load balancing from CPICH
power tuning is very simple. Another important thing is that
along with this DL load balancing, CSR, packet delay and
throughput are also improved and UL load does not increase.
Later in conclusion, we propose an example procedure to
achieve this load balancing by IFHO and CPICH power tuning.

Cell 1

0.4

Cell 7

0.6

Cell 8

0.55

Cell 19

0.5

Cell 20

0.45

Cell 26

0.4

Cell 27

0.35

Cell 30

0.3
1

Pilot power of Cell 7 and 20 [W]

Another thing to be mentioned about Figure 7 and Figure 8

is that the DL loads of frequency 1 and frequency 2 are almost
the same when IFHO function is active but the DL loads of
frequency 2 is higher than that of frequency 1 when the IFHO
function is not active. Although there in no clear reason about
which frequency should have higher load, this difference is, at
least, because of the load balancing effect of IFHO function.
Without IFHO function, the load difference between frequency
1 and frequency 2 is mainly determined at the call initiation
phase and then call blocks have an effect on this load
difference. In addition, call blocks are also affected by the load
situation. In this sense, the system load behavior without IFHO
function is more complicated than that with IFHO load
balancing effect. In other words, if IFHO function is used, its
load balancing effect makes the system load behavior simpler,
and makes the CPICH power tuning easier and more effective.

Cell 0

0.5

2.5

Figure 8. CPICH power impact on DL load without IFHO

Figure 6. The impact of CPICH power on IFHO rate

0.6

Pilot pow e r of Ce ll 7 a nd 20 [W ]

Pilot power of Cell 7 and 20 [W]

Cell 0

0.7

1.5

2 .5

P ilo t p o w e r o f Ce ll 7 a n d 20 [W ]

Figure 7. CPICH power impact on DL load with IFHO

Figure 9. CPICH power impact on UL load with IFHO

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TABLE I.

100
98

Cell
environment
Multi path
model
Fast fading

CSR [%]

96
94

UL P a c k e t C S R

92

D L Packet C SR

90

UL S p e e c h C S R
D L Speech C SR

88
86
1

1 .5

2 .5

Slow fading

P ilo t P o w e r o f C e ll 7 a n d C e ll 2 0 [ W ]

Figure 10. CPICH power impact on CSR with IFHO

Code
orthogonality
Propagation
model

In Figure 7, another topic needs to be analyzed. The loads

of hotspot-closest cells have a peak at CPICH power = 2.5 W.
The behavior of CSR shown in Figure 10 can explain this DL
load behavior. An important result from this figure is that the
DL speech CSR decreases dramatically at the CPICH power
of 3W. The increases of CPICH power leads to the increase of
coverage and load. The higher load triggers admission control
(AC) actions more and leads to lower CSR and lower load.
But due to the larger coverage, the number of packet users
increases, which leads to the larger load fluctuation. Therefore
the number of AC actions is still high although the average
load becomes lower.
V.

Load target
CPICH power
BTS max
power
Terminal
velocity
Number of
terminals
Proportion of
traffic

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we reported the benefit of a combination of

IFHO and CPICH power tuning. Analytical approach reveals
that IFHO can stabilize the load fluctuation and helps the
CPICH power tuning. Using a dynamic simulator, a
comparison of IFHO trigger types is done first. The results
indicate that CPICH EcNo is better than CPICH RSCP for
balancing load in the uniformly overlapped multi-frequency
WCDMA network. CPICH EcNo achieves 30-40 % DL load
decrease of the hotspot-closest cells. Although compressed
mode could make a certain amount of loss, according to the
literature, the loss is less than 20 % capacity loss, which is less
that the gain we obtained above. Next, we did simulations on
the combination of IFHO and CPICH power tuning. CPICH
power tuning can almost perfectly remove the load imbalance
at DL left by IFHO, while CPICH power tuning without IFHO
cannot achieve any load balance by simple CPICH power
tuning. Other performance indicators do not become worse in
the tuning of CPICH power with IFHO. Therefore, we
concluded that their combination is useful for DL load
balancing.
An example of simple optimization procedure is as follow:
First turn on IFHO to stabilize the load fluctuation and help the
CPICH tuning. Next, tune CPICH power to the optimum. Then,
tune IFHO threshold considering the balance of trunking gain
and the negative effect of compressed mode. There are reasons
for this procedure. Because CPICH power has a large impact
on IFHO rate, it needs to be tuned first. But without IFHO,
CPICH tuning shows totally different performance, CPICH
tuning needs to be done with IFHO. The quantitative
evaluation of the compressed mode needs to be done in future
work.

FER target

DYNAMIC SIMULATOR SETTING

18 macro cells (frequency 1)

23 macro cells (frequnecy 2)
Vehicular A
Jakes model
Log normal distribution with 8 dB
std.dev.
Site correlation = 0.5, sector
correlation = 0.8
Correlation distance = 50 m
0.5
Okumura-Hata model
UL target: noise rise = 4 dB
DL target: transmission power = 10
W
2 W, (1-3 W in CPICH tuning)
20 W
20 km/h
10000 UEs including active and
inactive
70 % speech (12.2 kbps) and
30 % packet (8, 12, 16, 32, 64, 144
kbps)
1 % for speech and 10 % for packet
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is supported by Nokia Research Center. The

authors would like to thank Rin Nagaike, Dr. Sivakumar and
the developers of WCDMA dynamic simulator.
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