UK

Radio Datasheet 0207 GPRS Radio Network Dimensioning

This datasheet is compiled and owned by Radio Engineering. Date of last update : 24 December 2008.

SUMMARY: This Datasheet outlines the requirements for dimensioning the radio network to
the required capacity for GPRS. The design criteria are described, along with
minimum configurations for cells and explanations on correct dimensioning for
particular requirements of GPRS throughput. This should be read in
conjunction with Datasheet 0033 [2] which gives the dimensioning rules for the
GSM network and also Datasheet 0254 [6] on Dual Rate Guidelines.

Target Audience Network Performance Managers, Radio Planners, Capacity Planners, Optimisers

General Policy GPRS is designed to utilise a combination of spare (latent), and dedicated timeslot
capacity in order to provide packet data services.

There are three types of timeslot reservation for GPRS: dedicated resource, default
resource and additional resource.

Dedicated resources are timeslots that are permanently reserved for GPRS traffic
and will not carry voice calls.

Default resources are timeslots that are initially configured as GPRS but are
converted to voice timeslots when there is demand for them. Voice calls always
have priority over GPRS default timeslots.

Additional resources can be configured as GPRS capable, but are not dedicated or
default. These voice timeslots are only configured for GPRS when required due to
the level of instantaneous GPRS load and when the CS load allows.

GPRS dimensioning requires special attention, particularly on large capacity cells, because
the relative amount of GPRS capacity on a cell is inversely proportional to its total
capacity. This is because the percentage of latent capacity decreases with increasing
number of TS on a cell, as demonstrated in Figure 1.
As an example, a cell with 2 TRX and 14 TS available for traffic. The blue line in the
chart represents how much traffic can be carried on a cell when assuming 1% GoS. 14
channels can carry 7.4 Erlangs of traffic, leaving 6.6 channels of spare capacity (purple
line) which is 47.5% (yellow line) of the total capacity. However, if we take a cell with 5
carriers and 37 channels then the spare capacity is only at the level of 28.7% of the total
capacity. It means that the data capacity becomes more constrained if having a
proportional traffic increase in both CS and PS domains.

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Figure 1. Channel utilisation based on Erlang B table 1% GoS.

Coverage Cells Dedicated GPRS capacity must be provided on cells that provide primary coverage. A cell
is classified as Primary coverage (or access layer) if it provides best server coverage to
target coverage areas. The number of timeslots required is dependent on the forecasted or
carried GPRS traffic, but the following are the minimum configurations:

Dedicated Resource
Access Layer Microcells and Picocells : Default configuration is 1 timeslot on 1
carrier cells, 2 timeslots otherwise. Under exceptional conditions, such as large in-building
coverage cells, this may be increased to 3. For large special events, it is recommended to
discuss detailed GPRS requirements with Radio Engineering for specific parameter
guidance.
Access Layer Macrocells : 1 dedicated timeslot per sector by default. Under
exceptional conditions, such as large in-building coverage cells, this may be increased to
3. For large special events, it is recommended to discuss detailed GPRS requirements with
Radio Engineering for specific parameter guidance.
Default Resource
6 timeslots on all cells
Additional Resource
All timeslots should be configured as GPRS capable.

Capacity Cells Capacity cells are cells that do not provide primary access capability, i.e. GSM1800 &
EGSM Macros associated with a co-aligned coverage Macro, or Microcells that have no or
little dominant coverage
Dedicated Resource

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No dedicated GPRS resource is to be defined on capacity cells for GPRS as the majority of
traffic will be carried on the coverage cells. However Default and Additional capacity is
required.
Default Resource
Capacity Picocells, Microcells and Macrocells : 2 timeslots
Additional Resource
All timeslots should be configured as GPRS capable.

Radio Resource Performance Target

The general GPRS/EDGE radio capacity performance target has been determined (based
on the results of trials [1] [5] ) as follows:
If, on any particular cell, there are either
More than 2.2 DL TBFs/Timeslot and more than 71000 active radio blocks in
any one hour, for more than 14 hours per week
Or
Less than 4 GPRS Available Timeslots and more than 36000 active radio
blocks in any one hour, for more than 14 hours per week

then this cell is defined as suffering GPRS congestion. If these thresholds are exceeded
over sufficient consecutive weeks (as defined in the hotspot process [3]) then the Area
Capacity Planner/Optimiser/Area Quality Manager needs to start an investigation. Please
refer to [3] for a detailed process description. GPRS hot spot reports are generated by the
regional performance monitoring teams on a weekly basis and these can be used as the
trigger for this process.
In addition, a fast response GPRS congestion hot spot criteria of more than 200 UL blocks
the CS busy hour for more than 2 days is applied to identify cells suffering sudden sever
GPRS traffic loads.

The key components of the above target are as follows:

Cell DL Throughput in Radio Blocks per hour (traffic measure)
This reflects the PS traffic (or volume of data sent) over a cell. Following the deployment
of EDGE, a simple kbits/s or Mbytes/hour value no longer reflects a constant level of
usage of the cell due to the high differential between the maximum and minimum EDGE
and GPRS data rates. Therefore, the actual number of transferred data blocks is used as the
traffic volume threshold. The thresholds selected relate to the number of radio data blocks
required to transfer 2Mbytes/hour or 1 Mbyte per hour respectively using coding scheme 2.
Combined GPRS and EDGE TBF/Timeslot (quality measure)
This is the average number of Temporary Block Flows per timeslot considering both
EDGE and GPRS counters. This measure reflects the customer perception of the service
very accurately, because a GPRS user establishes a TBF only when transferring data. More
TBFs in a TS means more users sharing the same resources, resulting in a limitation of
user throughput. In general the value 2 means that GPRS users are on average being
assigned about 50% of the bandwidth they have requested.

GPRS Available Timeslots (capacity measure)

This measure reflects the current GPRS capacity on a cell. The interpretation of this
counter might be different depending on the situation, as shown below, and cannot be used
as an indication of performance by itself:
GPRS Available TS = Default GPRS territory (ideal situation):

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o GPRS traffic in a cell is small enough to fit into the default territory and
the CS traffic is dimensioned correctly, so that it does not require
additional resources from the GPRS territory (TBF/TS < 1.5)
o GPRS traffic in a cell is large, but CS traffic prevents the usage of
additional GPRS territory (TBF/TS >= 1.5)
GPRS Available TS < Default GPRS territory (non ideal):
o There is high CS traffic which requests additional resources from the
GPRS, but GPRS traffic is small enough, so that limited resources does
not necessarily limit the GPRS throughput and thus GPRS is still
working satisfactory (TBF/TS <1.5)
o Whenever a number of GPRS available TS is less than 4 then all devices
with 4 TS capability get less resources than required, irrespectively of
the TBF/TS value. Decreased number of available TS also constrains a
cell throughput. It becomes an performance impacting condition when a
cell throughput is high (>1Mbytes is throughput busy hour)
GPRS Available TS > Default GPRS territory (non ideal):
o In this case, a cell experiences high GPRS traffic and triggers GPRS
territory upgrade (the territory upgrade is triggered when TBF/TS in a
cell exceeds 1.5). The CS traffic in this case is small enough to give out
its territory for GPRS. In this situation, the value of TBF/TS must be
used to determine if performance is being degraded.

EDAP Dimensioning Criteria

EDAPs are the entity created on the Abis interface to provide the additional transmission
bandwidth required to support the high data rates of EDGE. An EDAP pool is a group of
timeslots reserved on the PCM frame. If there is insufficient bandwidth within the EDAP
pool to support the requested bandwidth on the air interface, EDAP congestion occurs and
some radio timeslots are downgraded in their coding scheme to fit within the available
EDAP transmission bandwidth. If this EDAP congestion occurs regularly, then the
performance of the cell is compromised.
The EDAP congestion point is defined as 5% EDAP congestion due to small pool and
this threshold must be exceeded for at least 10 hours a week to constitute the cell being
classified as suffering EDAP congestion. When EDAP congestion consistently occurs, the
optimiser should investigate whether EDAP expansion is possible or cost effective. If
sufficient space for EDAP expansion exists with the existing transmission, and PCU
capacity on the parent PCU is not close to dimensioning limits, then DAP expansion
should be performed.
If transmission is available but PCU capacity would become limited following EDAP
expansion, then if PCU balancing would alleviate this; PCU balancing followed by EDAP
expansion should be performed. If PCU balancing would not resolve the PCU capacity
issue then FNE teams need to be engaged to supply additional PCU capacity.
If Abis transmission is not available, then careful consideration must be given to the cost
benefit of a transmission upgrade to supply additional EDAP PCM timeslots. Ideally, the
first course of action would be to remove a TRx from one of the sectors on the same E1
frame as the congested EDAP (replacing with Dual Rate) where possible to free up PCM
timeslots for EDAP use.

PCU Dimensioning Criteria

PCUs are dimensioned in terms of radio timeslots. Each PCU has a maximum number of
radio timeslots that it can support. Each timeslot can be used as either a master radio
timeslot supporting an actual air interface timeslot, or as a slave timeslot supporting
EDAP resource on the Abis interface. The exact distribution of master and slave timeslots
depends on the actual PCU version, and the limitations are shown in the table below. The
number of defined Dedicated or Default radio timeslot on each cell parented to a PCU,
and each 16 kb/s of EDAP resource counts as a reserved timeslot within the PCU for
capacity purposes.

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PCU Type Maximum Maximum Maximum

GPRS EDAP Total
Timeslots Timeslots Timeslots
PCU 128 128 -
PCU-S 128 128 -
PCU-T - - 256
PCU-B (3i) - - 256
Table 1 PCU capacity limits

PCUs should be dimensioned to less than 70% reserved timeslots. For PCU and PCU-S,
this applies to master timeslots. For PCU-T and PCU-B this needs to apply to the total
number of reserved timeslots (Radio and EDAP).
PCU Capacity Relief Procedure
PCU Capacity dimensioning is primarily the responsibility of the BSC planners. However,
if PCU congestion is observed through high values of the PCU counter Territory Upgrade
rejects due to PCU, then this should be flagged to the FNE team for action. There are two
options for alleviating PCU loads, PCU re-balancing or installing additional PCUs if
possible. If neither of these options is viable, then cell reparenting or BSC splits may be
necessary.
PCU balancing is the preferred approach to solving PCU load problems. If the number of
reserved timeslots or total EDAP sizes on each PCU within the BSC is significantly
imbalanced, then this should be re-balanced by redistributing cells between the PCUs. A
load balancing procedure exists within the FNE/OMC teams to perform PCU balancing
when performance issues are identified. If all PCUs are equally balanced and re-balancing
is not possible, then the FNE teams will, if justified instigate the installation of additional
PCUs or BSC splits/reparenting as appropriate.

GPRS Cell Level Capacity Relief Procedure

The GPRS dimensioning procedure is a reactive process and starts when a cell is found to
be GPRS congested according to the criteria specified in performance targets.
In general, the first approach in the alleviating GPRS hotspots is to enable Dual Rate on
the cell experiencing high GPRS usage. Dual rate needs to be enabled using GPRS specific
threshold values to free sufficient voice timeslots to relieve the GPRS congestion. If
enabling Dual rate removed the cell from the hot spot list, then no additional action is
required. If not, it may also be necessary to enable Dual Rate on co-aligned capacity layer
cells of the congested access layer cell in order to achieve the required GPRS timeslot
availability. This approach is not generally preferred due to the high volume of half rate
traffic that would be triggered due to the high utilisation of capacity layer cells.
Additionally, this can only be considered where the capacity layer cell is already achieving
near 100% utilisation in order to ensure that sufficient traffic would be off-loaded from the
access cell. If the capacity layer cell is not running at near 100% utilisation, then it is
likely that deploying Dual Rate on the capacity layer will only result in additional half rate
usage with no real traffic off-load from the access layer cell. In all cases, 900 MHz
capacity layer cells should be targeted for Dual rate before 1800 MHz cells due to the
higher utilisation generally achieved on these cells.
If enabling Dual Rate does not remove the cell from the hot spot list or Dual Rate does not
free up the required number of GPRS timeslots, then hardware upgrades should be
considered providing that the cell must achieve more stringent hotspot thresholds to
warrant the additional costs of the hardware upgrades. These thresholds are:
More than 2.2 DL TBFs/Timeslot and more than 71000 active radio blocks in
any one hour, for more than 20 hours per week
Or
Less than 4 GPRS Available Timeslots and more than 36000 active radio
blocks in any one hour, for more than 20 hours per week

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Hotspot cells that have the maximum level of Dual Rate applied but fail to achieve these
hardware upgrade thresholds should be regularly monitored against these hardware
upgrade thresholds, but no action should be taken for these cells until the hardware
thresholds are achieved, or other factors warrant consideration for upgrade such as
customer complaints.
Even if a cell achieves these more stringent thresholds, the cost of the required upgrade
may still be prohibitive if expensive rack upgrades are required. If 3G is not present on a
site requiring upgrade, and the cost of the 2G upgrade is approaching that of installing
3G, then the 3G upgrade should be fully investigated to understand if that would provided
a better data offload capability than upgrading 2G for GPRS.

Dual Rate thresholds The purpose of enabling Dual Rate on a cell is to free voice timeslots so that they become
available for GPRS usage. GPRS mobiles tend to require 3 or 4 timeslots at a time,
therefore just freeing up one or two timeslots is not going to provide any significant
capacity relief for a cell suffering GPRS congestion. In general, it will be required to free
up, as a minimum, a whole carriers worth of timeslots to provide significant GPRS
capacity relief.
For example, converting a single carriers worth of voice to Dual Rate would only free 4
timeslots for GPRS, as shown in Figure 2 below. Extending this concept further, if a cell is
suffering GPRS congestion and has an average of 2 TBF/TS and on average has 10 GPRS
timeslots available, then to return this cell to an ideal loading of 1 TBF/TS would require
10 voice timeslots to be freed up. To achieve anywhere near this level of free timeslots
would require two carriers being converted to Dual Rate, and the dual rate thresholds
would need to be set to trigger half rate usage at very low utilisation levels.

TS TS HR
0 FR 0 HR

TS TS HR
FR
1 1 HR

TS FR
TS HR

2 2 HR

TS TS HR
FR
3 3 HR

TS TS GPRS
FR
4 4
TS TS
FR
5 5 GPRS
TS TS GPRS
FR
6 6
TS TS GPRS
FR
7 7

Figure 2.
In order to determine the required dual rate thresholds, firstly the total number of required
GPRS timeslots must be calculated by simply multiplying the average GPRS available
channels by the average TBF/TS. This gives the average number of GPRS timeslots
required. This should then be rounded up to the next highest number of timeslots listed in
table 2. The timeslots resolution of this table is basically the standard 6 default timeslots
plus integer steps of 4 Timeslot expansion. When the number of required timeslots is
identified, the Dual Rate thresholds can be identified based on the number of TRxs
configured within the cell.

For example, if a cell is configured with 4 TRxs, and typical average GPRS available
channels are 8 with a TBF/TS value of 2 during hours of indicated congestion, then the

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O2 UK Radio Datasheet 0207 GPRS Radio Network Dimensioning

required GPRS timeslots would be 16. This would then be rounded up to a requirement of
18 and the correct DR thresholds would be FRL= 55% and FRU=64%. See ref [6] for
more information on Dual Rate thresholds.

It must be noted that the requirement for18 GPRS TS cannot be satisfied for a 3 TRx cell.
In that case, the highest defined dual rate thresholds should be used, and if that fails to
alleviate the GPRS hotspot then a hardware carrier upgrade must be considered.

Table 2 Dual Rate Threshold Values for GPRS congestion relief

On-going Hot Spot Monitoring

Following the application of capacity relief due to GPRS congestion as a cell level, it is
important that the cell is monitored to ensure the continued use of GPRS congestion relief
parameters is still appropriate, thus avoiding excessive use of unnecessary Dual Rate and
the associated licence costs.
Cells should be monitored to ensure that the total number of available channels does not
significantly exceed the level of defined channels. If the sum of the peak used TCH
channels and peak used GPRS channels is consistently below the number of defined
channels by more than 8 channels, then it is possible that the level of Dual rate usage is
too great and should be reduced.

[1] Radio Datasheet 0239 - Nokia GPRS Radio KPIs

Reference [2] Radio datasheet 0033 - Radio Network Dimensioning
Documents:
[3] GPRS Hot Spot Process Document found in:
\\brw2n1\CorpData\TechnologyOps&Programmes\StrategicPlanning\Bobs
Folder
[4] GPRS Dimensioning Trial Report
\\aries\technology\Radio\RDS Reports\2005\UKRE_05_110 GPRS
Dimensioning Trial - Issue 1.doc
[5] GPRS Dimensioning HR Trial Report
\\aries\technology\Radio\RDS Reports\2006\UKRE_06_023_GPRS
Dimensioning HR Trial.doc
[6] Radio Datasheet 0254 - Nokia Dual Rate Guidelines
\\aries\technology\Radio\Datasheets\DS0000\ds0254.doc

END OF DOCUMENT

The authors of this document are John Button &Patryk Debicki, Radio Engineering. For any questions or issues,
please contact the Radio Engineering helpdesk on 01753 565882 or e-mail radio.engineering.uk@O2.com.

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