A Concept for Dynamic Neighbor Cell List Planning in a Cellular System

Hikan Olofsson, Sverker Magnusson, Magnus Almgren

Ericsson Radio Systems AB

S-164 80 Stockholm
Sweden
Abstract - In the near future, capacity needs will lead to cellular systems with a complex mixture of cells with different sizes and unpredictable coverage areas. Such complex systems will increase the need for manual radio network planning dramatically, unless intelligent tools are developed to assist in the planning, This paper addresses the problem of determining which cells arc neighbors to a ccrtain cell. Today this has to be manually determined for each cell in a system. A concept is proposed where the neighbor cell lists are dynamically planned during system operation, with little or no manual assistance. The proposed class of algorithms uses information about the long term network behavior, and the neighbor cell lists are continuously updated. The proposed concept considerably reduces manual planning, and simulation results show that the scheme also improves the overall system quality by reducing the length of the neighbor cell lists.

cells without manual planning. Whereas several methods for dynamic frequency allocation have been proposed in the literature, e.g. [ 11-[3], dynamic planning of neighbor cell lists has hardly been addressed at all. The intention of this paper is to propose a concept for dynamic planning of neighbor cell lists which solves the problems involved with the manual planning of today. The analysis is done for a TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) system, but the concept is applicable and equally useful in all systems, regardless of multiple access method. Simulations are performed to evaluate the quality of the neighbor cell lists thus derived. 11. MOBILE ASSISTED HANDOVER The main digital cellular standards of today all use Mobile Assisted Handover (MAHO). It consists in letting the mobile station measure the signal strength on neighboring cells broadcast control channels. If the signal strength of a neighbor cell is sufficiently high compared to the own link signal strength, the network initiates a handover to that cell. To be able to perform measurements, the mobile must know which broadcast control channels are used in the neighbor cells. Therefore, for each cell the network stores a list of handover candidate cells. This list is referred to as the neighbor cell list for that particular cell. For each neighbor cell in the list, the cell identity is stored together with the frequency number used by the broadcast channel in the cell. When a mobile station enters a cell and needs to know what neighbors to measure, the frequency numbers included in the cells neighbor cell list are transmitted to the mobile station. This list of frequency numbers IS referred to as afrequency list. A simple example can be used to illustrate the use of neighbor cell lists. Consider Figure 1, where a mobile station enters cell B, through a call setup or a handover. The network stores a neighbor cell list for cell B, in this case including cells A, C and D (1). A frequency list containing the frequency numbers included in the neighbor cell list is transmitted to the mobile station via the base station ( 2 ) .The mobile station is then able to perform signal strength measurements on the selected frequencies (3) In GSM, the mobile station also decodes a 6-bit base station identity code (BSIC) transmitted on each cells broadcast channel. The measurements are periodically reported to the network (4) together with the received signal

I. INTRODUCTION

A major issue for cellular operators today and in the near future is system capacity. The fast subscriber growth in many cellular systems forces network operators to increase the number of sites and make cells smaller in order to provide higher capacity. There is already a fast development towards hierarchical cell structures (HCS), where large and small cells provide coverage for the same area. In that perspective, it is easy to realize that the effort and cost of manual planning of the networks will increase. Hence, there is a need for intelligent radio network algorithms that reduce manual planning. Creating and maintaining the frequency reuse plan of a system is a main task, as frequency planning to a large extent determines the quality and capacity of the system. Power planning is another important field since the output power of a cell determines its coverage. A third important system planning issue, which will be emphasized in this paper, is to determine neighbor cell lists. In todays main digital cellular standards, GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), D-AMPS (Digital American Mobile Phone System) and PDC (Personal Digital Cellular), a neighbor cell list for each cell is needed. Proper planning of these lists is a prerequisite for a well functioning network. The ultimatc goal would be a self-configuring system where frequencies and neighbor cell lists are allocated to all

0-7803-3692-5/960 1996 IEEE

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B. Flexibility
In an evolving cellular network, the neighbor environment of a cell is subject to frequent changes. New base stations are often installed, each of them requiring manual replanning of the neighbor cell lists in a number of surrounding cells. Moreover, in micro- and picocell layers the radio propagation is also affected by new buildings, new walls etc. Changes of this kind are even more difficult to handle, since they may be unknown to the network operator. A dynamic neighbor cell list algorithm based on measurements of the actual propagation environment, which actively tries to discover infrastructural changes, will reduce the need for time consuming manual replanning of the network.
C. Measurement accuracy

I!

FIGURE 1. The use of a neighbor cell list in a TDMA system that uses Mobile Assisted Handover (MA HO). strength on the own link. The reporting interval is in the order of one second. In the network, the measurement reports are used for handover purposes (5). The cell selection algorithms differ slightly between manufacturers, but are normally based on comparing the signal strengths of neighbors and own link. 111. PROBLEMS WITH MANUAL LIST PLANNING In commercial cellular systems of today, the neighbor cell lists are planned manually by the cell planner by means of theoretical coverage predictions before installation of a base station. A number of problems with the manually planned lists can be identified, and the aim of a dynamic neighbor cell list algorithm is to solve these problems. In the following sections the problems will be described, together with a description of how dynamic planning would help solving them.

Since the neighbor environment is difficult to predict, the cell planner must include a large number of cells in the list to ensure that all potential neighbors are included. However, the neighbor cell lists are used to control the MAHO measurements made by the mobiles, and since their measurement capacity is limited long neighbor cell lists cause poor measurement accuracy. A dynamic neighbor cell list algorithm will identify unnecessary cells and provide a possibility to keep the lists short, thus improving measurement accuracy.

D. Unfavorable neighbor cells The cell planner may make a mistake and include a cell in a neighbor cell list that is unfavorable in a sense that making a handover to that cell often means losing the call. In a conventional system with fixed lists, the unfavorable cell will remain in the list until a manual redesign is made. A dynamic neighbor cell list algorithm based on event statistics will identify and remove unfavorable cells from the list, thereby reducing the number of lost calls and reducing the need for manual replanning.
1V. CONCEPT PRESENTATION In order to solve the problems with manual planning, a dynamic list' planning scheme is proposed according to Figure 2. The basic idea is to let the neighbor cell lists be dynamically built, based on the long term behavior of the network. Information that is interesting for neighbor relations is collected and processed through slow filters, and thus the knowledge of the neighbor relations slowly increases. The knowledge is then used to update the neighbor cell lists. In the following sections, the different blocks in Figure '2 is examined in some detail. A. Neighbor list generator The neighbor list generator generates a neighbor cell list for each cell, based on event statistics from the statistics unit and measurements previously collected from mobile stations and base stations. The broadcast control frequencies of the

A. Predictability
Radio propagation is highly dependeint on the geographical environment. Statistical models for radio propagation in different types of environments exist, and the cell planner normally uses such models together with digitized maps to predict coverage areas and create neighbor cell lists for the cells in a system. However, the maps are not detailed enough to include buildings etc. which - together with the statistical nature of the propagation models - makes the predictions more or less inaccurate, especially in micro- and pic'olayers. A dynamic neighbor cell list algorithm based on measurements of the actual propagation environment will reduce the need for manual predictions.

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MEA5 -r ;UREMENT nc PORTS

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TABLE 1. System parameters used in simulations.

Number of simulated cells Cell radius Geographical traffic distribution Mean mobile speed Traffic time distribution

81 cells (27 sites with 3 cells each)

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Mean call time Distance attenuation model Shadow fading BS correlation Shadow fading spatial correlation Shadow fading std. dev.

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9 cell reuse I

FIGURE 2. Block diagram of the proposed scheme for dynamic neighbor cell list planning.

Handover hysteresis
DI-opped call ClI threshold

3 dB
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neighbor cells, the neighborfrequencies, are then put in a frequency list that is sent to the mobile station via the base station.

B. Test neighbor list generator To be able to discover new good neighbor cells, all potential neighbor cells within the system must be tested every now and then. The test neighbor list generator adds one or more test frequencies to the frequency list, thus allowing the mobile station to perform measurements on those frequencies. If a test neighbor cell is measured strongly by a large number of mobiles, the neighbor list generator takes this into account and eventually includes this neighbor in the regular neighbor cell list. In Figure 2, the test neighbor list generator is included in the neighbor list generator block.

C. Statistics unit
The statistics unit provides event statistics to the neighbor cell list generator. The events of main interest are handover failure rate between two cells, number of handovers between two cells and dropped call rate immediately after handover between two cells. V. SIMULATIONS To investigate the performance of the proposed concept, one version of the algorithm has been evaluated in simulations of a TDMA system. The used simulation environment dynamically models a large number of mobiles moving in an area covered by cells. The simulator includes models of traffic, radio propagation and radio resource allocation. Examples of output data from the simulator are the distribution of C/I samples for the ongoing calls and statistics of handover and dropped calls.
A. Simulation environment

resulting in 81 cells. To avoid border effects which would prevent the use of data from the border cells, a wrap-around technique was used. The traffic distribution was uniform throughout the area and calls were generated according to a Poisson process. The Okumura-Hata model was used to calculate the path loss between mobile stations and base stations. No multipath fading was included. Two lognormal shadow fading components were added to the pathloss, one with long spatial correlation distance modeling terrain variations and one with short correlation distance modeling buildings etc. The total standard deviation of the shadow fading was 8 dB. Moreover, the fading values between a mobile station and different base stations was correlated with a correlation coefficient p = 0.5. The resulting cell shapes are indicated in Figure 3. Each cell used 6 frequencies, one of which was defined as broadcast frequency. The frequencies were reused in every 9th cell, which implies that a total number of 54 frequencies were used in the system. Only one time slot was simulated due to limited simulation capacity. Cell selection at call setup and handover was based on signal strength, with a handover hysteresis of 3 dB. On average, handover occurred 0.37 times per call. Calls were dropped if the CO ratio was lower than 5 dB in either up- or downlink. Important system parameters used in the simulations are listed in Table 1.
B. Simulation methodology

Simulations were carried out for a system with static infrastructure, i.e. no base stations were added or removed during the simulations, and the radio environment remained the same.*Asimulation run consisted of three main parts, all performed continuously throughout the simulation: 1) collecting information about the network behavior,

A system with 27 equidistant 3-cell sites was simulated,

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2)

designing the neighbor cell lists based on gathered information so far, and monitoring the quality of the obtained lists.

3)

In the following, the methods used for the three parts are described and commented.

Collecting network information The information used to create neighbor cell lists was gathered by the mobile stations MAHO measurements. A frequency list including neighbor frequencies and test frequencies was sent to each mobile. All frequencies not defined as neighbor frequencies were defined as test frequencies. Hence, the total frequency list always consisted of all broadcast frequencies. Each cell maintained a filtered value for each other cell, describing its suitability for handovcr, which was updated during certain events. The events of interest were those when the signal strength of a frequency in the frequency list for which BSIC was decodable exceeded that of the own cell, Figure 3 illustrates the outcome for one of the cells (shaded). The surrounding cells are marked with filtered values describing how suitable for handover they are. The filtered values essentially correspond to the percentages of the total number of handovers from the shaded cell that go to each of the surrounding cells. Thus, the maximum value is 100, corresponding to all handovers going to one single cell. Designing the neighbor cell lists At the beginning of each simulation the neighbor cell lists were empty. (This is a pessimistic assumption: in a real network there would always exist some kind of initial lists.) For each iteration, updated neighbor cell lists were derived from the filtered values. For a certain cell A, the neighbor cell list was created by including the cells for which A had filtered values exceeding a certain predefined threshold. The same threshold was used for all cells. To sirnulate lists of different average length, the threshold was increased or decreased. Monitoring the quality of the obtained lists The quality of the obtained neighbor cell lists was monitored continuously. As the objective was to observe to what extent incorrect or incomplete neighbor cell lists result in poor selection of base stations, the situation for the mobiles who made correct base station choices was of little interest. A correct selection of base station is here equivalent to that which would result from having a neighbor cell list including all other cells. The important thing to monitor is consequently what mobiles make an incorrect (choice, and how that effects the quality of their connection. Thus, the simulations were performed in the following manner: For each simulation, with designed lists corresponding to a certain threshold value, a parallel reference simulation was run in which the mobiles performed in an identical fashion, apart from the fact that selection of base station was

FIGURE 3. The left plot shows the typical coverage area for some of the simulated cells. The right plot is part of the simulation result: the filtered values show how suitable handovers are from the shaded cell. Based on these, a neighbor cell list for the shaded cell can be generated.

based on neighbor lists including all other cells. To make this possible, a mobile station dropped or blocked in either of the parallel simulations was removed from the other as well. Information was then gathered only for mobiles that had selected different base stations in the parallel simulations.

C. Simulation results
In Figure 4, the results from simulations with dynamically designed lists and different list thresholds are plotted. The top plot depicts the average list length as it develops over time. The middle plot shows the percentage of time a mobile selected a different base station than that of its identical twin in the reference system. Finally, the bottom plot shows the degradation in received signal strength for the differing mobile stations compared to the reference system, which is used as quality measure. The results show that the algorithm converges faster with a lower threshold. On the other hand, when a steady-state is reached, a low threshold value results fn larger performance variance between iterations. Figure 5 shows the performance when a steady-state is reached as a function of average list length. For comparison, results are also shown for two simulations where the lists consisted of the 6 and 18 geographically closest cells respectively. These results are represented by dashed lines. Some conclusions may be drawn from Figure 5. First of all, note that the number of occasions with different base station choices decreases as the neighbor list length increases, just as the difference in signal strength for those particular mobiles compared to their reference twins. This should not come as a surprise. The quality is poor for very short lists and increases fast with increasing list length until an average list length of 6 is reached. With 6 neighbors in the lists, the system with dynamically designed lists displays a performance similar to that of the system with the 6 geographically closest cells in the lists. One should note that the quality improves as the dynamically designed lists expand beyond that length. From the results in Figure 5 it is easy to draw the hasty

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conclusion that the overall system quality improves with increased number of neighbors in the lists. It may even look as if the best performance is achieved with neighbor lists including all cells. However, since long lists have the disadvantage of poor measurement accuracy (which is not modeled in the simulations), long lists still have to be avoided. The main result of the simulations is that by gathering MAHO measurement statistics from a system, it is possible to design neighbor cell lists without manual planning. The signal strength performance of a system with such lists is similar to that of systems whose lists include the geographically closest cells. It is worth noting that the results have been obtained in a system with a simple cell structure. In a system with a mixture of cell sizes and more complicated traffic patterns, the dynamic list planning scheme is expected to perform even better relative to systems planned using only geographical information.

VI. CONCLUSION
A concept for dynamic planning of neighbor cell lists in a cellular system has been proposed. A number of advantages have been described, among them the considerable reduction in manual planning needed for the network operator. By means of simulations it has been shown that the proposed scheme has a performance similar to that of a manually well-planned system. In fact, since the proposed scheme is able to reduce the average length of the lists without loss of signal strength performance, the proposal improves the overall system quality, since long lists imply poor measurement accuracy.

VII. REFERENCES
[I] Y. Furuya, Y. Akaiwa, Channel Segregation, A Distributed Adaptive Channel Allocation Scheme for Mobile Communication Systems, in Proceedings of the Second Nordic Seminar on Digital Land Mobile Radio Communications, Stockholm, pp. 778-78 I , 1987.

[2] H. Andersson, H. Eriksson, A . Fallgren, M. Madfors, Adaptive Channel Allocation in a TIA IS-54 System, in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, pp. 778-78 I , 1992.
5 5 I

[3] M. Almgren, M. Frodigh, B. Hansson, J. Lundequist, K. Wallstedt, Adaptive Channel Allocation in TACS, in Proceedings of the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, pp. 15 17- I S2 I , 1995.

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FIGURE 4. Performance of systems with dynamically designed lists with different average length as they develop over time, compared to the reference system. Results are given for three different thresholds, 10,5 and 0.5.

FIGURE 5. Steady-state performance of lists with different average length, The solid lines correspond to a system with dynamically designed lists. The dashed lines correspond to two systems, including in the neighbor cell lists the 6 and 18 geographically closest cells respectively.

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