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1. INTRODUCTION
Design of handover initiation can be made to use several
measurements such as the received signal level from the
communicating and neighboring base stations, the path loss
to the base stations, and bit error rate. In general, hysteresis
and signal averaging is employed to enhance the performance
of handover(i.e. probability of unnecessary handover at the
expense of handover delay). Previous studies on handover
initiation have revered that there are trade offs between
handover delay and number of unnecessary handover.
Handover initiation criteria analyzed in literature are
mainly based on the length of averaging window, the
threshold level and the hysteresis margin. In addition,
WCDMA introduce the Time-to-Trigger mechanism to
reduce unnecessary signaling and ping pong effects. Also,
averaging window is used to smooth out random signal
fluctuations and to make handover decisions to be based on
underlying trends and not instantaneous changes.
Soft handover is essential for intra frequency in WCDMA.
The active set i s defined as the set of base stations to which
the mobile users is simultaneously connected. Soft hand over
involves active set update procedure which include signaling
of appropriate event triggered by the mobile based on the
measurement of the measurement quantity (i.e. Ec/Io, path
loss, etc). Frequent reporting may cause unnecessary
handover and signaling overload. On the other, if the
reporting is too seldom, it may increase the handover delay.
WCDMA(3GPP) recommendation does not specify the
measurement and averaging interval be fixed or variable.
Actual physical layer measurement depends on the
implementation of the mobile unit. However, WCDMA
specifies the network controlled features to enhance the
3. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
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Layer I
filtering
Pamters 1
Paramters 2
Layer 3
% filtering -b Evaluation
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ofreporting
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MEASUREMENT REPORT
AT
is
If Measured quantity at point C(Meas-Sign)
continuously larger than the best measured set present in the
active set( Best-Ss) minus add hysteresis for Time-toTrigger(AT), then measurement reporting message for the
eventlA is sent over the air interface to the RNC as shown in
Figure 2. Similarly, the eventlB can be reported. The
reporting events constitute basic input to handover algorithm
in the RNC, where the handover decision is made (i.e. Active
set addition, Active set removal).
4. SIMULATION MODEL
B. Handover Scheme
An example of basic handover algorithm is shown in
Figure 3, which exploits the hysteresis and Time-to-Trigger
mechanism. Event 1A and event 1 B are implemented in this
example. Since the soft handover algorithm is performed at
RNC, load control strategy and other radio resource
management strategy can be exploited for active set updates
considering any of the measurement quantities described in
PI.
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r ( d ) = K, - K , log,,(d) + v ( d ) + 201og,,[e(d)]
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F ( d ) := K, - K, l o g , , ( d )
Parameter
Value
Propagation Model
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Standard Deviation of
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B. Performance Measures
Optimal handover is the trade off between the number of
unnecessai-y handover and the handover delay. Many
previous literatures have studied the properties of this trade
off for various parameters such as the hysteresis margin and
the length of averaging distance[8]
In WCDMA, the standards specify the measurement model
and the range of parameters like Layer3 filter coefficient,
hysteresis and Time-to-Trigger. But, the impacts of these
parameter:: and different choices for the values remain to be
clarified.
WCDMA use soft handover mechanism to enhance the
coverage and capacity of the network. Soft handover
mechanisrn involves active set update and removal as
described in the previous section. To many reporting events
will cause unnecessary active set updates and increase the
signaling load. On the other hand, infrequent reporting may
cause delay in handover. Optimal size of soft handover
depends on loading conditions and, etc. The size of soft
handover area can be also controlled by the system
parameters.
Number of reporting events triggered for handover and
handover delay are key performance measures in this paper.
In our simulation, the tradeoff between the number of
reporting events and average distance of active set
additioniremaval, averaged over 1000 runs, are investigated
with different hysteresis margins, Layer 3 filter coefficients
and Time-to-Trigger. Average distance of reporting event 1A
i s the mean distance at which the active set addition for BS2
takes place.
1OdB
20m
47dBm
CPICH Power
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H yst-ADD
lSdB,3dB,4SdB,6dB
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2SdB,5dB,7SdB,lOdB
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Oms,200ms,400ms
Measurement Pen od
200ms
Sampling interval
Layer3 filter coefficient
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+ V ( d )+ 2010gl,[e(d)]
0.1-1
5. SIMULATION RESULTS
Figure 5 . shows the expected number of reporting eventlA
for mobile traveling at speeds 50km/h and 120km/h with
various hysteresis, not using Time-to-Trigger. Number of
reporting events i s quite large when Time-to Trigger is not
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used. It can be observed that the layer3 filter can reduce the
number of reporting events significantly. Especially at low
mobile speed, it shows significant improvements. The effect
of the hysteresis is also shown in this figure. Figures 9. and
IO. show the mean distance at which the mobile sends the
reporting EventIA for BS2 and eventlB for BS1,respectively.
It can be interpreted as the expected point where the mobile is
enterindleaving the soft handover area. This position
depends on the setting of hysteresis levels, but Layer3
filtering also has effects of delaying the distance of
enterindleaving the area. Similarly, as show in Figures 11
and 12, the Time-to-Trigger mechanism also delays the
reporting events. The gain of soft handover and optimum size
depends on many factors including the system loads and the
capacity.
Figure 6. represents the expected number of reporting
event 1A with Time-to-Trigger of 200ms. It is interesting to
observe that the rate of increase of the number of reporting
event starts to slow down at some point as alpha is increased.
Further, in Figures 7 and 8, with 400ms Time-to-Trigger, the
number of reporting actually begin to decrease at some point
along alpha. This characteristic is explained as follows. First,
with no Time to Trigger, the smoother curve will obviously
give less reporting events since it has smaller variations. If
the Time-to-Trigger of 200ms and 400ms is used, two and
three adjacent samples are subsequently evaluated,
respectively. Exponential averaging induces correlations
between these samples. Correlated samples will be
undesirable than independent samples in extracting the
average value. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between
obtaining the stable measurement results and getting
independent samples. Consequently, in setting Time-to-
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6. CONCLUSIONS
This study investigates the impacts of each of the network
controlled features (including Layer3 filter, hysteresis margin
and Time to Trigger) in handover initiation mechanism. The
study shows various tradeoffs between the parameters. It was
investigated in terms of the number of event reporting and
handover delay distance. The performances are also shown to
depend on the velocity of the mobile. We have also
discovered that the layer3 filter and Time-to-Trigger
mechanism may cause negative effects on each other in some
cases anti there is an optimum combination, when used
simultaneously. The results presented in this study may help
in understanding the behavior of the features related to
triggering of handover measurement reports and in extracting
optimum parameter values. Further, these results can be used
for developing more efficient handover algorithms.
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REFERENCE