Anna Larmo

The LTE link-layer design

The LTE radio interface for 3GPP Release 8 was specified recently. This article describes the LTE link-layer protocols, which abstract the physical layer and adapt its characteristics to match the requirements of higher layer protocols. The LTE link-layer protocols are optimized for low delay and low overhead and are simpler than their counterparts in UTRAN. The state of- the-art LTE protocol design is the result of a careful crosslayer approach where the protocols interact with each other efficiently. This article provides a thorough overview of this protocol stack, including the sub-layers and corresponding interactions in between them, in a manner that is more intuitive than in the respective 3GPP specifications.

Handover within 3GPP LTE: Design Principles and Performance

The 3GPP LTE system has been designed to offer significantly higher data rates, higher system throughput, and lower latency for delay critical services. This improved performance has to be provided and guaranteed under various mobility conditions. Hence, handover (HO) and its performance are of high importance. This paper investigates the performance of the handover procedure within 3GPP LTE in terms of HO failure rate and the delay of the whole procedure. System level simulations within a typical urban propagation environment, with different User Equipment (UE) speeds, cell radii and traffic loads per cell have been performed. The entire layer 3 signalling exchanged via air interface is considered in the simulations. In addition, errors at the Layer 1 (L1) control channels are taken into account. Simulation results show that the handover procedure within 3GPP satisfies the goal of high performance mobility. Namely for cell radii up to 1 km and for UE speeds up to 120 km/h, the HO failure rate lies within the range of 0-2.2% even in high loaded systems. For medium and low loads even at speeds of 250 km/h, HO failure is below 1.3 %. In addition, simulation results show that the handover procedure is robust against L1 control channel errors.

Efficient small data access for machine-type communications in LTE

In this paper, we address the emerging concept of Machine-Type Communications (MTC), where unattended wireless devices send their data over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular network. In particular, we emphasize that future MTC deployments are expected to feature a very large number of devices, whereas the data from a particular device may be infrequent and small. Currently, LTE is not optimized for such traffic and its data transmission schemes are not MTC-specific. To improve the efficiency of small data access, we propose a novel contention-based LTE transmission (COBALT) mechanism and evaluate its performance with both analysis and protocol-level simulations. When compared against existing alternatives, our data access scheme is demonstrated to improve network resource consumption, device energy efficiency, and mean data access delay. We conclude that COBALT has the potential for supporting massive MTC deployments based on the future releases of the LTE technology.

Analysis of PDCCH performance for M2M traffic in LTE

As Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is starting to be widely deployed, the volume of machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic is increasing very rapidly. From the M2M traffic point of view, one of the issues to be addressed is the overload of the random access channel. The limitation in the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) resources may severely constrain the number of devices that an LTE Evolved Node B (eNB) can serve. We develop a Markov model that describes the evolution of the Message 4 queue in the eNB formed by several users performing the random access procedure simultaneously, and then, we study its stability and performance. Our model explicitly takes into account the four initial steps in the random access procedure. By utilizing the model, we are able to determine the stability limit of the system, which defines the maximum throughput and the probability of failure of the random access procedure due to different causes. We observe that the sharing of the PDCCH resources between Messages 2 and 4 with different priorities makes the performance of the whole random access procedure deteriorate very rapidly near the stability limit. However, we can extend the maximum throughput and improve the overall performance by increasing the PDCCH resource size. Furthermore, we estimate the upper limit of the number of devices that can be served by an LTE eNB and determine the minimum PDCCH resource size needed to satisfy a given traffic demand.

Machine-to-machine communication with long-term evolution with reduced device energy consumption

We present a method to reduce the device battery consumption to efficiently support battery-operated machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in 3GPP long-term evolution. The long-term evolution discontinuous reception (DRX) is a key mechanism in reducing the device energy consumption, and we discuss how the traffic behaviour of machines in the Internet of things scenarios differs from the typical cellular user of today, for whom the current DRX mechanism is optimised for. We list typical transactions in M2M scenarios and discuss how the DRX operation is affected. We continue by introducing a power consumption model for M2M devices. Our assumption is that the device transmits small amounts of data in the uplink with deterministic intervals. The model takes into account the energy consumption in the active and the nonactive periods of the communication, which alternate depending on the DRX configuration. We use the model with different parameter settings referring to potential future M2M devices and identify the parameters, which contribute most to the device energy consumption. The results indicate that making the current maximum DRX cycle length longer will lead to significant gains in the energy consumption of M2M devices compared with what is possible today. Our key contributions include the discussion of the DRX mechanism in the Internet of things scenarios and the realistic assumptions for the potential of trading the responsiveness of a device for energy consumption gain with very long DRX cycles. Copyright

Reducing energy consumption of LTE devices for machine-to-machine communication

We present a method to reduce the device battery consumption to efficiently support machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in LTE. We first introduce a model for calculating energy consumption of a LTE device. We assume that the M2M device transmits small amounts of data with deterministic intervals. Our model takes into account the energy consumption in active and nonactive periods which alternate depending on the configuration of discontinuous reception (DRX). We use the model with different parameter settings referring to potential future M2M devices. The results indicate that making the current maximum DRX cycle length longer would lead to significant gains in the energy consumption of M2M devices. Thus, our key contribution is to show the potential of trading the responsiveness of a device for energy consumption gain with very long DRX cycles.

RAN overload control for Machine Type Communications in LTE

In Radio Access Network (RAN) overload situations, more access attempts are made to the system than the system can handle. In particular, Machine Type Communication (MTC) devices are foreseen as potential source of overload in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. In this paper, we study overload scenarios caused by MTC traffic in LTE and investigate how to solve them. Especially, we study Extended Access Barring (EAB) recently introduced in 3GPP to control the access load. We find that performance of the EAB scheme depends on many factors such as what parameters are used and how the parameter values are updated in the System Information (SI). We find that EAB solution for MTC overload control can solve the overload situation effectively, if configured properly.

Internet Access Performance in LTE TDD

The Time Division Duplex (TDD) uplink-downlink configuration of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) determines how the ten subframes in a radio frame are divided between the downlink and the uplink. The specified configurations cover a wide range of allocations from a downlink-heavy resource distribution ratio (9:1) to an uplink-heavy ratio (2:3). In this paper, we compare the performance of Internet access using the TCP protocol in different downlink-heavy asymmetries. We find that the performance depends on many factors such as the transferred file size, the control channel errors and the downlink/uplink traffic mix. When the file size is small, TDD can not fully utilize its potentially higher downlink capacity because of longer uplink access delays as well as shortage of uplink resources in the chosen configurations. With an increased file size, this effect fades away and TDD provides higher download bit rates than FDD. The realized increase in bit rate is however not as high as the calculated increase in available downlink resources.

Performance analysis of IoT-enabling IEEE 802.11ah technology and its RAW mechanism with non-cross slot boundary holding schemes

IEEE 802.11ah task group is working on a new amendment of the IEEE 802.11 standard, suitable for high density WLAN networks in the sub 1 GHz band. It is expected to be the prevalent standard in many Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine (M2M) applications where it will support long-range and energy-efficient communication in dense network environments. Therefore, significant changes in the legacy 802.11 standards have been proposed to improve the network performance in high contention scenarios, most important of which is the Restricted Access Window (RAW) mechanism described in the amendment. In this paper we analyze the performance of the RAW mechanism in the Non-Cross Slot Boundary case under various possible holding schemes. We propose new holding schemes as well as a new grouping scheme for RAW mechanism based on backoff states of the stations. The proposed schemes are shown to improve the saturation throughput and energy efficiency of the network through extensive simulations. These schemes can therefore be adapted in practical deployment scenarios of the IEEE 802.11ah use cases to improve the overall network performance. Overall, these advanced features make 802.11ah standard a true IoT-enabling technology towards seamless integration of massive amount of connected devices in the future.

NB-IoT Technology Overview and Experience from Cloud-RAN Implementation

The 3GPP has introduced a new narrowband radio technology called narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) in Release 13. NB-IoT was designed to support very low power consumption and low-cost devices in extreme coverage conditions. NB-IoT operates in very small bandwidth and will provide connectivity to a large number of low-data-rate devices. This article highlights some of the key features introduced in NB-IoT and presents performance results from real-life experiments. The experiments were carried out using an early-standard-compliant prototype based on a software defined radio partial implementation of NB-IoT that runs on a desktop computer connected to the network. It is found that a cloud radio access network is a good candidate for NB-IoT implementation.