2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

LTE Speech Traffic Estimation for Network

Dimensioning
UTRAN Traffic Performance Approach

Elias Jailani, Muhamad Ibrahim

Ruhani Ab Rahman

Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Universiti Teknologi MARA,
40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
elias.jailani@alcatel-lucent.com, muhdyus@yahoo.com

Faculty of Electrical Engineering

Universiti Teknologi MARA,
40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
ruhani467@salam.uitm.edu.my

Abstract- LTE voice application is based on packet IP which is

known as VoLTE by GSMA. To estimate VoLTE traffic, the
UTRAN voice calls need to correctly convert into full-IP traffic
and impose with a correct LTE codec. The knowledge to estimate
data rate requirements is very important for network planning &
dimensioning. This paper provides a dimensioning approach for
LTE network using the readily available UTRAN traffic data
from the speech traffic perspective. The estimated traffic
throughput requirement per eNodeB as well as overall LTE
network cluster is presented and can be used to dimension the
eUTRAN as well as IP Transport nodes.

II.

A. Study on UTRAN traffic Data

The research study was conducted in urban area of
Kuantan, a town in the east coast of Peninsular of Malaysia. A
total of 173 cells were gathered for a duration period of 3
weeks: from 23 March to 14 April 2010.
Data collection is carried out using Network Performance
Optimizer (NPO) tool that are available in operators central
Network Management System reside in Petaling Jaya [3]. NPO
capable to provide variety of performance data nearing ten
thousand indicators and counters that were subgroup into [4]:
Accessibility, Feature Monitoring, HSDPA/HSUPA, Load &
Capacity, Mobility, Quality, Retain ability, Topology and
Traffic. For this work, only Traffic counters/indicators are
used. Further study indicates only 10 counters are required
specifically related to traffic. Figure 2 shows the study
approach.

Keywords- Long Term Evolution (LTE), UMTS Terrestrial

Radio Access Network (UTRAN), Third Generation (3G), Voice
over LTE (VoLTE), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave
Access (WiMAX))

I.

METHODOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Long Term Evolution (LTE) was designed with high-speed

mobility to cater originally with the requirement for subscribers
riding in high speed train/vehicle in Europe. Both WiMAX and
LTE share the same radio technology of OFDMA (Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiple Access) [1]. With LTE RAN
capable to deliver 300Mbps on the downlink and 75Mbps on
the uplink, thus the user access portion may not a crucial factor
during early deployment. Operators may face issue on how to
transport this huge application data over the existing IP
infrastructure, especially when existing UTRAN subscribers
start migrating to LTE network.

Figure 2: Research Study approach flow-diagram

LTE services are pure packet type of services. Figure 1

shows the LTE network topology.

B. Definition of UTRAN Traffic Counters

Table 1 shows a table definition on 10 counters used in
this work. Voice Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) CS Erlang and
Video CS Erlang is defined by calculating as follows:
AMR Erlang = VS.DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished. Cum * 0.1 / 3600.

For example, if a single user establishes a call that lasts for the
entire hour, 1 Erlang of traffic is generated according to the
definition. Going back to the formula above, the counter shall
give:

Figure 1: LTE Network Topology native IP [2]

978-1-4673-2210-2/12/$31.00 2012 Crown

315

2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

03/28/2010

03/28/2010

03/28/2010

03/28/2010

03/27/2010

03/27/2010

03/27/2010

03/27/2010

03/26/2010

03/26/2010

03/26/2010

03/26/2010

03/25/2010

03/25/2010

03/25/2010

03/25/2010

03/24/2010

VS_DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished_
DlAsCnfCsSpeechNbLrAmr_Cum [t=200ms] = 2;

03/24/2010

03/24/2010

VS_DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished_
DlAsCnfCsSpeechNbLrAmr_Cum [t=100ms] = 1;

1000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
03/24/2010

Call Attempts

VS_DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished_
DlAsCnfCsSpeechNbLrAmr_Cum [t=0] = 0;

Time

VS_DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished_
DlAsCnfCsSpeechNbLrAmr_Cum [t=3600000ms] = 36000

Figure 3: Call arrival pattern for speech

This is equal to 1 Erlang. The same is applicable for

VS_DlAsConfIdAvgNbrEstablished_DlAsCnfCsData_Cum
counter which is referred to video call.

The call arrival on Figure 3 is for cell EW10010_1_1 that

shows that speech service resemble the Random call Arrival
Pattern. Thus, Erlang traffic model can be used for this case.

TABLE 1. COUNTER DEFINITION

D. Counters Grouping, Periods & Busy Hour

The 10 counters are grouped according to the services on
how the counters are incremented. The analyses are made
based on the services group called Speech call, Video call and
Packet switch call.
Hourly data are selected instead of daily data to show the
behavior of the traffic during the data period taken. The best
situation is to take the busy-hour. The following information
can be derived from hourly data are Daily busy hour, Weekly
busy hour, Monthly busy hour and Busy hour of a cluster
(Group of cells).

C.

E. Voice over LTE (VoLTE)

VoLTE is Voice over packet call & transmitted via IP to
evolve Packet Core (ePC). The VoIP IMS based profiles
defines a minimum mandatory set of features a wireless device
and network are required to implement in order to guarantee
an interoperable, high quality IMS-based telephony service
over LTE radio access [6].
During conversation, the speech signal will be
digitized & compressed by a vocoder. The codec used in LTE
is AMR which were described in 3GPP TS 26.104
specification. The total of 160 samples is generated on every
encoded AMR speech frame [7]. This encoded voice are
packetize into voice frame in the transport layer called Real
Time Transport Protocol (RTP).

Tele-Traffic Theory & Call Arrival Pattern

One of major influencer that identifies the model is Call

Arrival Pattern. There are three main call arrival patterns
namely, Smooth call Arrival Pattern, Peaked Call Arrival
Pattern and Random Call Arrival Pattern.
A smooth or hypo-exponential traffic pattern occurs when
there is a small amount of variation in traffic. Peaked call or
also known as hyper-exponential call pattern with longer
spikes from the mean and requires extra capacity to manage
peak period. Poisson & exponential distribution is random
traffic pattern. The call arrival is unpredictable and arrive in
random. Normally this pattern is generated by many callers
but each contributed only small traffic [5].

F. Coding, Packet Header and Packet Rate

Packetization and coding rate can influence the gross
bandwidth throughput of VoLTE. AMR has 8 modes with
different code rate where the higher coding rate, the better
speech quality. AMR codec samples the waveform at regular
interval with 8000 samples per second. These samples are then
concatenated into VoIP packet for a fixed period 20ms.

The data gathered have 3 counters related to call arrival to

differentiate the three services of speech, video and packetcall.

Common usage in AMR code is 1 frame per packet. The

choice of having more frames per packet is a trade-off
between latency and IP transmission overhead. However,

316

2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

VoLTE through RFC 3551 specification does not specify this

figure.
Total header for VoIP packet in VoLTE is 78 octets. The IP
packet rate can be calculated using:

transmission data during silence period. During silence period

the UE will send Silent Indicator frame in the payload instead
of speech payload together with a timestamp [6]. Similarly, the
UE will insert silence mode called Discontinuous
Transmission (DTX) in RAN.

Packet rate = Total load (octet) x packet per second

number of frame per packet
where;
Total load = Total header + payload,
Total header = Ethernet header + IP header +
UDP header + RTP header
Payload = frame octet x number of frame.

I.

Codec Mode Adaptation

Codec Mode Adaptation was aimed to maintain the AMR

speech call under a wide range of transmission media. This
technique enables UE and network to adapt the codec mode
according to the link transmission quality. If the IP link media
is bad, source coding is reduced and coding mode is increased.
To perform mode adaptation, the decoder (speech receiver)
needs to signal the encoder (speech sender) the new mode it
prefers [7]. The signaling is called Codec Mode Request
(CMR) and transmitted over the speech frame.

For AMR mode 0:

Payload = (95/8) x 1 = 11.875 octets
Total header = 38 + 20 + 12 + 8 = 78 octets
Total load = 78 + 11.875 = 89.875 octets
Thus;
Packet rate
= (89.875 x 50) / 1
= 4493.75 octets/sec
= 35.95 kbps

III.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The IP packet rate for VoLTE calculated on both AMR

and AMR-WB are shown in Table 3. These figures are used to
estimate VoLTE traffic on S1-U interface.

The above calculation is based on bandwidth-efficient mode,

whereby the payload is consists of digitized speech bit. For
more robust, octet aligned mode is chosen. In this mode, the
remaining bit in an octet of payload is filled with padding bit.

TABLE 3: RESULTED IP BANDWIDTH CONSUMPTION FOR AMR

AND AMR-WB

For octet aligned mode:

Payload = 12 octets
Total header = 78 octets
Total load = 90 octets
Resulted;
Packet rate
= (90 x 50) / 1
= 4500 octets/sec
= 36 kbps
G. Robust Header Compression (RoHC)
RoHC was specified in 3GPP TS 36.323 IETF RFC
3095 and RFC 4815 which explained the compression scheme
for IP/UDP/RTP header [8][9]. The VoLTE IP/UDP/RTP is a
constant 40 octets in length as shown in Figure 4. This size is
large as compared with the payload of 12 octets for AMR
mode 0. This header value corresponds to 51% of the total
frame size.

Figure 4: Header and payload size for AMR Mode 0 with & without RoHC

H. Voice Activity Detection (VAD)

If RoHC is used the better IP bandwidth consumption will
be achieved. Figure 5 & 6 show a comparison of bandwidth

AMR like others codec such as G.729B and

G.723.1A has the capability to detect talk-spurts and silence
gaps. Voice Activity Detection (VAD) suppresses

317

2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

consumption with and without RoHC and the bandwidth

consumption saving generated.

20
18
16
14

EB10056_1_7

12

EB10058_1_7

10

EB10058_1_8

EB10094_1_7
EW10002_1_1

EW10002_1_2

4
2

3 /2

4/2
3 /2 0 10
5/2
3 /2 0 10
6/2
3 /2 0 10
7/2
3 /2 0 10
8/2
3 /2 0 10
9/2
3 /3 0 10
0/2
3 /3 0 10
1/2
0
4/1 10
/2 0
4/2 1 0
/2 0
4/3 1 0
/2 0
4/4 1 0
/2 0
4/5 1 0
/2 0
4/6 1 0
/2 0
4/7 1 0
/2 0
10

Figure 5: Calculated AMR IP bandwidth consumption saving with Robust

Header Compression

Figure 8: Traffic carried during busy hour for different cells

Figure 7 shows daily busy hour trend for 6 different cells

and Figure 8 shows the corresponding speech carried traffic in
Erlang on the 6 cells. Capacity shifting can be implemented
from the constantly low traffic of cell EB10058_1_7 to high
traffic cell EB10056_1_7.
Therefore, all traffic dimensioning including for future
LTE network must be based on the analysis of busy-hour for
the worst-case traffic scenario.
For cluster network dimensioning, overall summation of cells
traffic at every hours within monitoring period need to be used
to determine the cluster busy hour. Figure 9 indicates the
busiest hour for Kuantan town cluster falls at 10:00-hour with
4509.37 Erlangs. This figure will be used to estimate the
requirement on transport node.

Figure 6: Calculated AMR-WB IP bandwidth consumption saving with

Robust Header Compression

A. Determination of Busy-Hour
Dimensioning a network such as LTE must be based on
peak-hour or busy-hour traffic. Balancing between busy-hour
and non-busy hour at different cells enable mobile operator to
implement capacity shifting from one cell to the other to cater
for a specific busy hour. (i.e. capacity requirement during peak
hour of the month).
25

20
EB10056_1_7
15

EB10058_1_7
EB10058_1_8
EB10094_1_7

10

EW10002_1_1
EW10002_1_2

B. Converting to LTE speech traffic -VoLT

The UTRAN Erlang traffic will be converted based on 1
Erlang that is equal to 1 active voice for 1 hour (3600 seconds)
and divided by 8 bits to get the unit in kbytes. The data used is
based on daily busy hour to reflect the peak period which can
be used for dimensioning purposes. Figure 10 shows UTRAN
speech traffic for the selected 5 sites with a total 15 cells.

26

/20

3/

/20

3/

/20
24

25
3/

3/

1
27 0
/2
3/ 2 0 10
8/2
3/ 2 0 10
9/2
3/ 3 0 10
0/2
01
3/
31 0
/2
01
4/ 0
1/ 2
0
4/ 1 0
2/ 2
0
4/3 1 0
/ 20
4/4 1 0
/ 20
4/5 1 0
/ 20
4/6 1 0
/ 20
4/7 1 0
/ 20
10

10

Figure 9: Total Erlangs figure for all cells in Kuantan town cluster.

10

Figure 7: Cell Busy hour of the day for 6 different cells

318

2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

Figure 12: Comparison of speech data requirement at cell EW10072_1_1 for

different type of AMR Codec used with and without RoHC and VAD

Figure 10: UTRAN Erlang value during busy hour of the day

The selected sites are chosen based on their high traffic

behavior throughout the monitoring period. Site names:
EW10003_1, EW10006_1, EW10010_1, EW10029_1,
EW10072_1. Figure 11 is the corresponding traffic data after
implementing using packet data VoLTE.

D.

Dimensioning of LTE Network

Figure 13 shows the total bandwidth requirement for
site EW10072_1. This site consists of 3 sector cells of
EW10072_1_1, EW10072_1_2 and EW10072_1_3.

Figure 13: Resulted bandwidth requirement for speech at site EW10072_1 for
AMR Mode 7 codec

Figure 11: LTE VoLTE Traffic using AMR Mode 0 during busy hour of the
day

The dimensioning on this site is based on 7 April busyhour date which is the busiest day during the monitoring
period. Total bandwidth requirement is 91964.98 Kbytes in
one hour or 204.37 kbps for using AMR mode 7 codec rate
with Header Compression & VAD activated.

Analysis on cell VoLTE traffic can be used to determine the

requirements for LTE cell and eNodeB IP transport capacity.
C. Comparison on bandwidth consumption (with & without
RoHC & VAD)
In order to know total traffic requirement for single
eNodeB, all the three shared cells of the same eNodeB need to
be summed. We can also see the differences in-terms of
capacity requirement if RoHC & VAD is used. Figure 12
shows the comparison of speech data requirement at cell
EW10072_1_1 for different type of AMR Codec used with
and without RoHC and VAD.

To determine how much IP bandwidth is needed on S1-U

interface, a collection of all cells traffic on every hour for a
total 24 hours need to be analyzed. The busiest hour traffic of
this summation data is taken for the calculation.

We can easily see the advantage of using RoHC and VAD.

Thus, higher AMR coding rate is possible with lower Ethernet
bandwidth as shown in Figure 12.

319

2012 IEEE Symposium on Wireless Technology and Applications (ISWTA), September 23-26, 2012, Bandung, Indonesia

FUTURE RESEARCH RECOMMENDATION

This study on LTE dimensioning only covers the speech
traffic; signaling, video and other application traffics should be
addressed as well to determine LTE network requirements.
CONCLUSION
UTRAN mobile operator requires the initial dimensioning
so that the operator will not over-spend into the new
technology, instead to adequately deploy the new technology
network according the end-users demand. In addition, mobile
operator will be able to gauge level of readiness on it IP
network to take the new LTE traffic load. It has been observed
that the gross bandwidth throughput of VoLTE depends on the
packetization method and coding rate chosen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Figure 14: Total speech traffic for Kuantan cells cluster based on AMR Mode
7 with and without RoHC and VAD

I am grateful to Alcatel-Lucent NPI Asia Pacific team for

providing the cell data.

The busiest hour period is at 10 am with 29423 Mbytes

traffic, which is equivalent to 65Mbit/s total bandwidth
requirement in the IP network. This is shown in Figure 14.

REFERENCES
[1]

Erik Dahlman, Hannes Ekstrm, Anders Furuskr, Ylva Jading, Jonas

Karlsson, Magnus Lundevall, Stefan Parkvall of Ericsson Research,
The 3G Long-Term Evolution Radio Interface Concepts and
Performance Evaluation, IEEE 2006.
[2] Alcatel-Lucent, Long Term Evolution (LTE) Overview, October 2008
[3] Alcatel-Lucent, NPO Introduction: NPO Document Concept Guide
Release M3,2009.
[4] Alcatel-Lucent, Indicators Reference Guide: Baseline Indicators,
2001-2009.
[5] Cisco Press, Traffic Analysis for Voice over IP, 2007.
[6] V1.0.0, One voice,One Voice; Voice over IMS profile, 2009-2011.
[7] J. Sjoberg, M. Westerlund, A. Lakaniemi & Q. Xie. Network Working
Group RFC 4867, April 2007.
[8] C. Bormann, C. Burmeister, M. Degermark,H. Fukushima,H. Hannu, LE. Jonsson, R. Hakenberg, T. Koren, K. Le, Z. Liu, A. Martensson, A.
Miyazaki, K. Svanbro, T. Wiebke, T. Yoshimura, H. Zheng, Network
Working Group RFC 3095, July 2001.
[9] L-E. Jonsson, K. Sandlund, G. Pelletier, P. Kremer, Network Working
Group RFC 4815, February 2007.
[10] M. Wernersson, Scheduling of Multi-Media over 3GPP LTE, Lulea
Tekniska Universitet, March 2007.
[11] S.Pracht, D. Hardman, Voice Quality in Converging Telephony and IP
Networks, Agilent Technologies, October 2001.

Thus, dimensioning needed to cater for speech traffic in

the area of Kuantan town cluster is:

204.37 kbps on eNodeB for site EW10072_1 (as

example)
65 Mbit/s on S1-U interface connected to Packet
Gateway (P-GW)

Figure 15: Resultant total bandwidth requirement on S1-U interface with

different AMR codec modes.

320