Parul Gupta, IBM Research India COMSNETS - Jan 8, 2010

Unlocking Wireless Performance with Cooperation in Base-Station Pools

2009 IBM Corporation

Overview

Why Co-operate?
Base Station co-operation in present network architecture Pooled Base Station architecture Potential cost savings through pooled BS model for a few scenarios Interference Avoidance Interference Alignment Uplink Macro-Diversity Efficient handovers Summary and Future work

2009 IBM Corporation

Why Co-operate?

There is demand for supporting many users with high data rates at high mobility. Challenges: Spectrum is limited: Reuse desirable For systems with spectrum reuse, capacity is fundamentally limited by interference With the trend towards smaller cells for reducing transmit power and better reuse, handovers become more frequent

Base Stations (BS) can co-operate to Spatially multiplex many independent data streams on the same channel. Prior work shows increased channel rank for such virtual arrays [1] Distributed Transmit Beamforming Interference Avoidance and Interference Cancellation Load Balancing via joint-scheduling Reduces latency during handoff, necessary for real-time applications like VoIP and streaming video

[1] V. Jungnickel, S. Jaeckel, L. Thiele, L. Jiang, U. Krger, A. Brylka and C.V. Helmolt, Capacity measurements in a cooperative MIMO network,IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 58, no. 5, pp. 2392-2405, Jun 2009. 3 2009 IBM Corporation

Co-operation in Distributed Network Architecture

Assumption of infinite backhaul not always true US has 75% copper, 15% fiber and 10% microwave. Companies like Clearwire are leasing T1 bundles for their new network deployment: 6 T1s per Wimax BS in Manhattan! Cost increases with each extra T1-line leased: $400 p.m. for 1.54 Mbps Some co-operation schemes might still be possible in the distributed network architecture with limited backhaul Schemes need to be designed appropriately for constraints, e.g. limited co-operation There is a cost associated with communication over the backhaul: whether over a peer-peer BS interface (where exists) or a higher hierarchical element like RNC or ASN Gateway

2009 IBM Corporation

Present 2G-3G Wireless Network architecture 4G Wireless Network with Co-located Base-Station Pools
Access Network Core Network

PSTN

Service Network SMS/MMS SMS/MMS IMS WAP GW

Mobile switch center Management Edge gateway Server

BS BS cluster network Radio
TD-SCDMA

WiMAX GSM

GSM

controller Content Service Web Service Service support Radio network Gateway node Edge controller Billing gateway

BS

BS

Internet

BS cluster
LTE LTE WiMAX WiMAX

BS

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Base Station Pools eliminate communication costs in co-operation

Information resides in a common place, transparently accessible to all BSs

Make fine-grained communication possible Co-operation schemes require exchanging high volumes of data in short times become realizable In this work, we estimate the potential cost savings for a few such schemes

2009 IBM Corporation

Interference Avoidance
Full Frequency Reuse System

Capacity of full frequency reuse systems gets limited due to interference, esp. for cell-edge users
Interference can be avoided with joint resource allocation and power control, e.g. Fractional Frequency Reuse Less complex, but takes a capacity hit

Cell 1

Cell 2

Cell 3

Fractional Frequency Reuse System

Each BS needs to share its power information with neighbors

2009 IBM Corporation

Interference Avoidance Example Communication Cost

Relative Narrowband Transmit Power (RNTP) messages specified in LTE specifications can indicate interference in the Downlink Contain a bitmap for each Resource Block (100 per slot in 20 MHz bandwidth) Similarly for Uplink, Interference indicator messages restricted to once every 20 ms to avoid excess overhead

1200

RNTP Signaling Overhead (Kbps)

1000

Every Every Every Every

Slot (0.5ms) 2 slots (1ms) 4 slots (2ms) 8 slots (4ms)

800

600

400

200

3 4 Number of neighboring eNodeBs

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Interference Cancelation
Rather than avoiding interference, co-operating BSs can pre-code the transmitted signals to minimize interference at the receiver Interference alignment [1] Asynchronous Interference mitigation [2] More complex because of signal processing Assumes all co-operating BSs have full Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter Dimensionality of channel matrix with K transmitters and receivers: K2 For sharing this information with all co-operating BSs, communication cost grows as K3 Example backhaul calculations are done assuming the complex CSI for the 720 data subcarriers, 10 MHz Wimax channel, fed back every 10 ms Note: Spectrum to feedback CSI to the transmitter potentially an issue. TDD systems can utilize channel reciprocity to estimate downlink-CSI
60

2 Co-operating BS
50

3 Co-operating BS 4 Co-operating BS

Backhaul overhead (Mbps)

40

30

20

10

0 4 6 8

Quantization bits

[1] V. Cadambe and S. A. Jaffer, Interference alignment and degrees of freedom for the K-users interference channel, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 54, no. 8, pp. 3425-3441, Aug 2008 [2] H. Zhang et. Al., Asynchronous Interference Mitigation in Co-operative Base-Station Systems, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 7, No. 1, Jan 2008

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Uplink Macro-Diversity
y1
Macro-Diversity schemes today (e.g. in MacroDiversity Handover in Wimax) in the uplink rely on selection diversity The extra gains due to Maximal Ratio Combining are untapped due to large amounts of data exchange and computation complexity Example calculation shown for communication cost for 10 MHz Wimax channel, 2:1 DL:UL ratio, 5 ms frame, assuming 3 samples need to be transmitted per subcarrier The amount of data to be transferred over the network is large, even for few quantization bits Base-Station Pools eliminate this communication cost over the network, making MRC realizable

y2 h2 x

h1

120

100

MRC traffic overhead (Mbps)

80

60

40

20

0 8 9 10 12 16

Quantization (bits/sample)

10

2009 IBM Corporation

Faster Handovers with Co-operation MS

MOB_NBR-ADV MOB_SCN-REQ MOB_SCN-RSP Scan Channel RNG_REQ RNG_REQ Scan Channel RNG_RSP MOB_ASC_REPORT MOB_MSHO-REQ BS #2, BS #3 MOB_BSHO-RSP Handover to BS # 2 MOB_HO-IND CONTEXT TRANSFER RNG_RSP

Serving BS (#1)

Target BS (#2)

Target BS (#3)

End Tx/Rx
DL/UL MAP, DCD/UCD RNG-REQ RNG-RSP Resume normal operation RNG-REQ RNG-RSP AUTHENTICATION REG-REQ REG-RSP Resume normal operation

Service interruption duration

Shorter iterations to Multiple ranging cycle adjust local parameters

2009 IBM Corporation

Faster Handovers with Co-operation

Handovers can be made faster by Co-ordination between base stations for ranging Transfer of static context (service flow, authentication & registration info) and dynamic context (ARQ states, pending data)
Shared MS data

BS1

BS2

BS3

Co-located Base Station Pool

12

2009 IBM Corporation

Summary and Future Work

Co-operation between Base Stations can improve wireless system performance in various ways Interference Avoidance and Interference Cancellation Load Balancing via joint-scheduling Macro-Diversity Schemes Faster Handovers
Fine-grained co-operation becomes possible due to transparent information sharing in BaseStation Pools So far, we have set the motivation for co-operation in BS pools through estimating potential cost-savings. Future work would be to demonstrate working schemes in a BS pool and solve associated issues.

13

2009 IBM Corporation