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In fact, US deployment of 4G LTE started initially with deployment in big cities such as
Dallas, New York, Orlando etc.
Islands of 4G in an ocean of 2G and 3G
Well it definitely makes sense to have such a deployment strategy. It does meet the
financial needs of the operators, takes away the risk, keeping supply demand where
customers are. Most of the revenue comes from the same big cities.
To keep business growing and revenue coming in, it’s a reasonable business model to
start LTE deployment in islands.
A pain point for the Operators and Performance Engineers:
We as customers want to consume, Netflix, Facebook , email and Apps all the time
through our smart phones. In order to fuel this consumption — access to Packet data
services is needed. Customers get wild access to high speed data on 4G.
Operators’ preference is to give customers access to 4G most of the time. Data access
is the biggest treat for customers and the money maker for the operator, while voice
revenues are declining.
The only problem is, not all areas are covered by 4G. This creates a challenge for
performance engineers to keep the UE on 4G LTE as much as possible to have a better
user experience.
In this discussion, we will focus only on IDLE MODE, with the mission that UE should
prefer LTE in presence of 3G.
IDLE MODE TECHNIQUES
In idle mode, preference on LTE over other technologies should starts from the point UE
is powered on. That is to say in idle mode, LTE ought to be preferred during
PLMN Selection
Cell Selection
PLMN Selection
When UE is powered on. It can see different operators’ carriers, technologies
broadcasting PLMN. Ideally UE wants to select Home Public Land Mobile Network
(HPLMN).
1. HPLMN Selector with Access Technology: defines the priority of each technology (LTE,
WCDMA in this case).
2. With operator controlled PLMN selector, a telecom operator can prioritize the PLMN and
access technology.
3. Whereas with user control PLMN selector with access technology: allows the end user-
to prioritize the PLMN and technology.
1. HPLMN or highest priority equivalent to HPLMN (EHPLMN) (if EHPLMN list is available)
2. PLMN and access technology combinations defined within user Controlled PLMN
Selector
3. PLMN and access technology combinations defined within Operator controlled PLMN
Selector
*PLMN are reported to NAS as high quality if their RSRP >= -110 dBm
CELL SELECTION:
Cell Selection in Idle Mode takes place using S-Criteria. I am not going to explain S-
criteria over here. Topic for another discussion.
In idle mode, our objective is to make UE prefer LTE over any other technology. In Idle
mode UE performs measurements whenever it is awake in Idle mode.
There are some thresholds defined in the standards using which we can force the UE to
only do measurements on LTE, not on other technologies such as WCDMA in idle
mode.
This way we can make UE delusional that it does do any measurements on other RAT
but on LTE only.
For this purpose, we use two four variants of the parameters. Two for LTE related
measurements and other two for IRAT related measurements.
For UE to perform idle mode measurement on LTE alone even in presence of WCDA
for example.
(Srxlev and Squal are the outcome of S-critera in case of RSRP and RSRQ
measurments respectivley. They need to be greater > 0 for S-criteria to be fulfilled )
The exhaustive list of options. For UE to perform measurements on Intra LTE in idle
mode or not is shown in the picture below.
as WCDMA.
The condition for this to happen are similar to earlier conditions as follows.
Actual values, depend on operator’s policies and what boundaries do they have for
different Frequency bands and different IRAT in the neighborhood areas.
The table listing exhaustive list of relationships for setting different values for
SnonIntraSEarch is shown in the table below.
Remember Cell-Reselection is different than Cell Selection. Once you get this point
clear, we can proceed further to discuss. How priorities can be used
Absolute priorities can be allocated to RF carriers belonging to LTE and other Radio
Access Technologies (RAT). What does this mean is that even if two different LTE
frequency cells are available in Idle mode. An operator can still give priority to one
frequency over the other so on and so forth.
Priority Values
Absolute priorities can be allocated values between 0 and 7.
If UE is measuring same signal strength from two different cells. It will reselect the one which has
higher priority
In order to make LTE is preferred over WCDMA. The solution is to have LTE be given a
higher priority versus other technologies such as WCDMA in this case as depicted in
the figure above .
UE only perform cell reselection evaluation for LTE RF carriers and inter-RAT RF
carriers which are defined within the system information and for which the UE has a
priority.
Inter-System and Different Priority inter-Frequency Cell Re-selection
There are 2 rules for cell re-selection towards an inter-system cell , or towards an inter-
frequency cell with a different priority to the current serving cell.
Before the two set of rules are presented. New parameters are introduced for it
*The values for Thresh,high, Thresh,low and Threshserving,low are signaled using
values between 0 and 31 , while the actual value of these parmaeters is Signaled
value *2 , which means the actual range for these threshold is 0 to 62 i.e., ( 0 to 62)
In new releases, the names for these parameters are varied a little bit.
In all cases, cell reselection is only permitted if more than 1 second has passed since
the UE camped on the current serving cell.
If more than one candidate cell meets the criteria for cell reselection, the target cell is
selected according to:
if the highest priority RF carrier is an LTE RF carrier, then cells are ranked using intra-
frequency ranking criteria.
if the highest priority RF carrier belongs to a different RAT, then cells are ranked using
the ranking criteria for that RAT.
How to bring UE back to LTE from WCDMA in Idle Mode ?
In case of scenarios where UE goes onto WCDMA in idle mode. For example during CS
Fallback etc. What can be done to bring UE back onto LTE for WCDMA in such a case.
SIB 19 is used to bring UE to go from WCDMA back to LTE in Idle Mode. Setting proper
value of SIB 19, can also help UE to come back on to LTE with higher priority over other
technologies.
Measurement Bandwidth
Priority
QrxlevminEUTRA
Threshx High
Threshx Low
In all the above discussion, we have focussed only on standard parameters used in Idle
mode.
For connected mode, operators can have their own specific features defined to keep the
UE remain on LTE most of the time , in addition to performing proper
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