Monday, November 25, 2013

Handover and power control in UMTS network

The rapid growth  of mobile and internet users has led towards the development of the third generation of mobile communication systems. The UMTS is a family of 3G mobile networks designed to offer high bandwidth radio access.
Enhanced UMTS is a Umts evolution step, which makes possible an effective high data rate end to end packet based transmission . IST-SEACORN has proposed a set of enhancements to UMTS which include among others advanced modulation and radio transmission techniques improved strategies for IP routing and QOS assurance.
HANDOVER
The handver process is one of the essential means that guarantees user mobility in a mobile communication  network. The concept of mobility is simple.
When a subscriber moves from the coverage area of one cell to another , a new connection with the target cell is set up and the connection of the previous cell is released.
A basic handover process consists of three main phases:
a)     Measurement phase dealing with the mechanics of measuring important parameters.
b)    Decision phase algorithm parameters and handover criteria
c)     Execution dealing with radio resource allocation and handover signaling.

1.     Operating environment

A handoff algorithm needs to be designed with the operating radio environment in mind in order to define the correct parameters needed in the decision phase. Operating environments are usually separated as:

        Indoor: low speeds and well-defined mobility paths

        Outdoor: variable speeds and mobility paths that depend on each environment separately.

A further classification of environments can be made according to their cell size:

        Pico-cellular and micro-cellular environments: characterized by small cells and low transmit powers. In pico-cellular both users and base stations are located indoors, whereas in micro-cellular only outdoor users are considered. The antenna height in a microcellular environment is typically at lamppost level (5m above ground).

        Macro-cellular environments have large cells (several kilometres) and transmit high output power with the antenna mounted on a high tower above all surrounding rooftops (15m+ above ground).


POWER CONTROL
Power Control has a dual operation. Firstly, it keeps interference at minimum levels by controlling the power transmitted, achieving further to minimize the power consumption at the mobile user (called User Equipment (UE) in UMTS) and the base stations (called Node Bs in UMTS). Secondly, it ensures an adequate quality of service (QoS) level so that the percentage of dropped calls is kept below the acceptable thresholds.

Power Control is important both in the uplink and the downlink directions. In the uplink direction control is required in the situations where UEs are located very close to the Node Bs and are transmitting with excessive power. This is called the near-far effect and can result in blocking the whole cell, with UEs that are close to the cell edge possibly overlooked. If the uplink power is too high interference in neighbouring cells (inter-cell interference) may also be a direct result of the near-far effect. In the downlink direction, Power Control directly affects system capacity. System capacity is determined by the total downlink transmission power for each cell i.e. when total downlink transmission power is minimized then the Node B can accept more UEs and the capacity is increased.





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