An integrated approach for UTRAN planning and optimization

The design of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN) radio network controller (RNC) required the integration of hardware and software from multiple vendors and development organizations across a multinational project. The RNC architects, drawing on their experience with previous object-oriented projects, designed an abstract, distributed, object-oriented operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAM&P) system. A key component is the innovative data-driven fault management (FM) design. It is not just integrated with the devices being controlled; it is integrated into the entire system. FM data is a central project resource used to drive internal error and fault handling, operational state changes, external alarms, and generation of customer documentation. The design takes advantage of well-known commonality and variability design concepts for easy implementation and maintenance. The FM architecture makes the definition of an error, fault, alarm, and fault-handling behavior as simple as adding a row of data. © 2003 Lucent Technologies Inc.

In order to achieve global roaming of UMTS users, the satellite segment is integrated in the UMTS terrestrial radio access network and it replaces a terrestrial Node B. As the satellite capacity to support a big number of users at the same time is high, terrestrial RNC will just support one satellite/Node B instead of several terrestrial Node B, meaning a gain in coverage. Our proposal is to study the capacity of USRAN (UMTS satellite radio access network) for mixed traffics sent over satellite channel in order to achieve dimensioning that can be used for call admission control. The interest of such a study is to give the possibility of USRAN dimensioning, i.e., to determine the capacity needed for a number of flows given by the operator. In this paper we describe the network architecture for satellite integration with UMTS terrestrial radio access network. Performance analysis and testing were done for voice traffics represented by an ON/OFF source model as well as for data transfer application

This paper presents verifications for UMTS coverage and capacity in a live network using planning and performance tools applied to a real-world operational UMTS network. Case study results are presented and followed by comparisons between coverage predictions, capacity simulations, field measurements and system statistics. Tuned propagation models based on area clutter, population profiles, digital height maps and base station (BS) engineering elements are taken into account to match the outputs of the planning tool to the practical drive-test and UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) system Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measurements. This work outcome addresses the importance of using planning tools for dimensioning coverage and capacity aspects in UMTS networks and draw some attention to network future optimization, load balancing and congestions relief in advance before system traffic statistics are being generated or afterwards as supplementary grounds for network optimization and maintenance that support statistics.

The rapid evolution of 3G technology demands an adaptive, robust network management system. In the 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) system, a new radio access network (RAN) called UTRAN (UMTS terrestrial radio access network) is introduced based on W-CDMA (instead of TDMA/FDMA) air interface transmission. The normal network management functionality needs to be supported that is, fault configuration, accounting, performance and security management (FCAPS). The network resource model for UMTS is defined by 3GPP [1] and is object oriented Output data for bulk configuration has a standard XML format defined by the 3GPP. By applying standard software engineering techniques for exporting XML from a relational database we demonstrate that using a relational database for storing management data can achieve very good performance for bulk configuration management export.

SUMMARYNetwork traffic monitoring and analysis are essential for effective network operation and resource management. In particular, multidimensional analysis for long‐term traffic data is necessary for comprehensive understanding of the traffic trend and effective quality‐of‐service provision considering the extremely dynamic behavior of the current Internet, where various types of traffic occur from high‐speed network links and greatly increasing number of applications. However, only limited analysis results are provided, as the existing network traffic analysis tools and systems are developed and deployed focusing on their own specialized analysis purposes. Consequently, it is difficult to understand the network comprehensively and deeply, which increases the necessity for multilateral analysis of long‐term traffic data. In this paper, we propose a novel traffic analysis model for large volumes of Internet traffic accumulated over a long period of time. TheNetCube, the proposed network traffic analysis model using online analytical processing (OLAP) on a multidimensional data cube, provides an easy and fast way to construct a multidimensional traffic analysis system for comprehensive and detailed analysis of long‐term traffic data by utilizing simple OLAP operations and powerful data‐mining techniques on various abstraction levels of traffic data to complete the analysis purpose. We validate the feasibility and applicability of the proposedNetCubetraffic analysis model by implementing a traffic analysis system and applying it to our campus network. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (EUTRAN) offers high uplink and downlink throughput. In this paper, we investigate the performance of five different schedulers of media access control for resource allocation, such as round robin (RB), proportional fair (PF), best channel quality indicator (CQI), max transmission point (TP) and resource fair (RF). On comparing the performance of resource allocation schedulers in the indistinguishable arrangement, we found the proportional fair (PF) offers balance in terms of individual metrics. Furthermore, we analyse the effect of feedback transmission time interval (TTI) delay on two typical EUTRAN networks referred to as long term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advance (LTE-A). We evaluate the performance of the PF scheduler for both networks under varying feedback delay in TTI. Simulated results show that the delay in TTI affects the performance of resource allocation. Feedback delay improves network performance by compensating effect of imperfect channel.

In today's rapidly changing market, an operator needs to introduce new offerings faster and at a lower cost than its competitors. This requires network configuration tasks to be highly automated. However, current network configuration methods have limitations: they use direct-input commands, which is a primitive method that is inflexible and hard to automate; have inadequate modeling and thus cannot represent complex relations and dependencies; and are hard-coded with the underlying model so that model change causes error-prone code change. This paper proposes a general approach for automating network configuration tasks using multi-level modeling: the first level represents the underlying domain; the next level, the inter-relations between models; and the third level, the configuration task business logic. Using multi-level models, a generic engine can be built to auto-generate executable configuration commands. A prototype has been implemented for a UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). When tested on a set of representative configuration tasks, the implementation effort and duration are significantly reduced.

UMTS access networks can provide a wide range of bearer services with different levels of quality of service suitable for multimedia applications with bit rates of up to 2 Mbit/s. These multiple services are managed by use of composite transport channels, each having static and semi-static transport channel parameters such as transport block size, CRC code length, channel coding schemes, RLC mode, MAC type, transport time interval, rate matching and spreading factor. The perceived quality of the application seen by the end user is greatly affected by the settings of these radio access parameters. The paper examines the effects of these network parameter settings on the performance of real-time video communications by simulating MPEG-4 coded video transmission over a UMTS multimedia evaluation test bed. It investigates the optimal radio bearer design for real-time video transmission over UTRAN (UMTS terrestrial radio access network).

Admission control in UMTS in the presence of shared channels

3G wireless communication is the next version of mobile networks. Load balancing in networks causes efficient using of network resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for load balancing of radio network controllers (RNCs) in radio access networks (RANs). As the characteristics of connections between RNCs and BTSs in a RAN are similar to those of graphs, we make use of graphs to solve our problem. The algorithm is based on the finding a path by which the RNCs could exchange their overloads. By using these paths the algorithm load balances the RNCs in an efficient and fast way. By testing our algorithm on networks with different topology and comparing the results, the efficiency and ability of our algorithm will be verified.

Resource management is one of the vital aspects in 3G networks as it controls the system capacity to manage congestion. It becomes more complex when all subscribers have to communicate using shared spectrum of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and require flexible, higher bandwidth services. A key issue in delivering wireless services is the problem of congestion which has an adverse impact on the quality of service (QoS). To cope with QoS, there is a need of intelligent RNC (radio network controller) at BS (base station), which cooperates to adapt and retrieve information to manage the resources intelligently and reliably in a consistent manner. The proposed intelligent RNC react autonomously keeping in view the service level agreement (SLA), network environmental changes and collaboration with each other to share their knowledge. Distant index based retrieval and adaptation algorithms are proposed in this paper to handle unpredictable scenarios. These RNCs, as a result, accept, reject or buffer a connection request to manage resources to meet QoS requirement as defined in SLA. The evaluation shows that system congestion for high priority subscribers is significantly reduced at the cost of low priority subscribers in real time.

On spectrum sensing in cognitive radio CDMA networks with beamforming

To cope with higher demands, future radio access networks will consist of densely deployed base stations (BSs). As the BS ranges in such deployments will often overlap, areas exists that could be served individually by one of several BSs or cooperatively by all members of a group of BSs (using techniques like CoMP). One BS typically serves several such areas. Each BS has to decide, which area to serve when. This problem is compounded by the need to coordinate cooperative transmissions across several BSs. We model this as a queuing problem where each queue represents one particular area that is served by a specific combination of BSs; each BS has to decide which queue(s) to serve when. For three decision strategies, we derive a Markov model and solve it numerically to obtain steady-state solutions. These solutions let us quantify average latency and trade-offs between latency and number of BSs per area for both direct and cooperative scenarios. We show that cooperation reduces the number of BSs needed to cover an area but that a latency price has to be payed.

Aim of this paper is to present a radio communication system that can be easily integrated in an emergency communication network, which is able to relay analog and digital data. Implementation of a multiprocessor radio network controller, based on the FPGA technology, is the main goal of this project. This configuration allows a multiple possibilities of communication: APRS data transmission and analogue (voice) communication.

Nodes in a wireless sensor network scrutinize the nearby region and transmit their findings to the base station (BS) using multi-hop transmission. As the BS plays an important role in a wireless sensor network, therefore an adversary who wants to interrupt the operation of the network would avidly look for the BS location and imposes maximum damage by destroying the BS physically. The multi-hop data transmission towards BS makes a prominent pattern of the traffic (huge traffic near the BS region) that indicates the presence of BS in the nearby region and thus the location of the BS may expose to the adversaries. This work aims to provide a novel approach which will increase the BS anonymity. For this purpose, a randomly roamed BS and the special nodes are proposed to achieve the above mentioned objective. The special nodes produce a large number of high traffic regions, which are similar to the BS region. Now, there are many regions which look like BS region and hence the probability to get the BS region using traffic analysis is very low. Therefore, this approach increases the effort of adversaries in order to find the exact BS position. We have used a standard entropy model to measure the anonymity of the base station and the GSAT test is used to calculate the number of steps required to find the base station. The results show that the proposed technique provides better results in terms of anonymity compared to the existing techniques.