s

How to discover faulty TRX in a hopping network?

To discover faulty hardware here explicitly faulty TRX there should be made use of the ‘Fault
Management’ offered by the OMC-B in the first stage.
Misbehaviors which can not be detected by the ‘Fault Management’ like broken connections,
loose cables or problems with passive entities can be revealed by using the Traffic
measurements offered by SSS and SBS.
One procedure to detect faulty TRX is given here. The procedure works in two steps. First
finding misbehaving cells. Second to identify in these cells the misbehaving TRX.

Make use of the REC_INTCELL measurement and evaluate

‘No assignment TCH Rate’
‘Lost before answer Rate’ (for formulas see appendix)

If both values are quite high (‘No assignment TCH Rate’ > 5% and ‘Lost before answer Rate’ >
3%) and there is no hard blocking existent this gives a hint on a misbehavior in the cell.
Hard blocking can be evaluated with the help of the SBS performance measurements.

To find out which TRX in the cell does not perform make use of the ‘power and quality
measurement’ available in the SBS performance measurements. This measurement even
going down to timeslot basis can help to identify misbehaving TRX. An example is given below.

RXQUAL CI 200- TRX 1

800
700
600
500
Uplink
400
Downlink
300
200
100
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
RXQUAL+1

Author: B. Kronmüller Version 1.0 Page 1/2

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RXLEV CI 200-TRX 1

120

100

80
Uplink
60
Downlink
40

20

0
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64
RXLEV+1

The graphs show a problem in the uplink path of this TRX resulting in the following:

In comparison to the uplink measurement reports a lot of downlink measurement reports are
missing. As the downlink measurement reports are build in the MS and transmitted via the
uplink to the BTS it seems that a lot of this reports are lost in the uplink path.
The distribution of the RXLEV values for the uplink differs totally from the expected one. A
expected distribution is shown below.

The values for RXQUAL in the uplink are very bad

In this case the faulty TRX could be identified. Practice has shown that his procedure in most of
the cases works and normally reveals any problem related to hardware or installation.
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