Drop Reason In LTE-2

In the previous document, we described the activities that the UE carries out to evaluate the condition of
the radio link to determine if it was in-synch or out of synch. Depending on the vendor’s
implementation, an out of synch indication may result in a drop session.

In this blog, we will concentrate on the activities carried out by the eNodeB when it detects that the
radio link has failed.

The types of failure that the eNodeB may detect (again, these may be vendor specific) are:

a) DL failure (RLC failures)

b) UL failure (Physical layer failure).

DL Failure at the RLC layer:

The RLC Layer has a failure when data or signaling that is sent over the air is unsuccessful and the RLC
Layer stops trying. When data is sent over the air, but is received incorrectly, the receiver will send a
NACK. Also, the transmitter can send a request for an acknowledgement of all received packets, by
setting the poll bit. The receiver will then send a list of all received packets. If a sent packet is not
received, it is considered lost. In either case, the transmitter will retransmit. See figure below.
This procedure can repeat, but at some point the transmitter will give up on the packet. If that happens,
the transmitter declares that the radio link has failed and starts the procedures to communicate that to
the other side.

The parameter MaxRetxThreshold determines the number of times a packet is retransmitted at the RLC
layer in the downlink. If this number is reached, the eNodeB declares a DL RLC failure and “kills” the
context as shown in the picture below.
UL Failure at the Physical layer:

Not all vendor implementation support this type of failure detection. It essentially consists in measuring
the power of the sounding reference signals (SRS) sent by the UE in the UL. If the power is below a given
SINR threshold, a timer gets started. If the SINR remains under the stated SINR threshold for the entire
duration of the timer, then the eNodeB declares the UL as out of synch and proceeds to “kill” the
context. If the SINR of the SRS goes above a second specified threshold during the timer duration, the UL
is said to be in-synch and no actions are carried out.

Below, the actions carried out by eNodeB are shown when an UL Physical Layer failure is detected.
Yes, increasing the value of maxretxthreshold may result in a decrease in the number of drop sessions
due to RLC DL failures.

However, to avoid a large number of drops, the best thing to do is to clean the RF environment in your
network.