Performance Analysis of Dual-Carrier HSDPA

Danlu Zhang, Pavan Kumar Vitthaladevuni, Bibhu Mohanty and Jilei Hou, Members IEEE1
latency throughout the whole cell. Furthermore, the fairness improves in DC HSDPA, benefiting the cell edge users more. With DC HSDPA, system capacity increases in offering both full buffer and bursty traffic. These performance gains will be discussed in detail in the sequel through both analysis and simulations. The advantages in DC HSDPA are also seen in other multicarrier systems including CDMA2000 1x Ev-Do Rev.B [10]. This paper is organized as follows. The analytical results on the DC HSDPA gains with bursty traffic are presented in Section II, where delay reduction is shown with little restriction on the scheduling. The dual-carrier joint scheduler design is discussed in Section III. Our simulation results are presented in Section IV, including the simulation framework, the results with full buffer and bursty traffic. Conclusions and further extensions are included in Section V. For basic knowledge on WCDMA, HSPA and HSPA+, please refer to [1], [2] and [3]. Very briefly, the downlink in HSPA+ inherits the HSDPA channel structure. The user data is transmitted over HS-PDSCH with the packet format information carried in HS-SCCH. The downlink transmissions are scheduled by the Node B scheduler every TTI (2ms). II. ANALYTICAL RESULTS WITH BURSTY TRAFFIC Most data applications are bursty [12]. A user with bursty traffic does not always have data in its buffer. Hence throughput is not the only performance metric. The total delay of each data burst is more important. In the following, we first analyze the total delay reduction in DC HSDPA. To make the analysis feasible, in this section, we assume the user channel conditions are not time-varying. Simulation results with realistic fading channels will be provided in Section IV. A. GI/G/1 result with general scheduling Here the only assumptions are that inter-arrival times are i.i.d and independent of the departures, and the inter-arrival and service times have finite means. We will prove that combining the two carriers reduces the total burst delay, as a manifestation of statistical multiplexing. The 2xSC system can be viewed as two servers, each serving a separate arrival stream. In a DC system, the two carriers/servers are combined to serve all the arrival bursts. Lemma 1 The average total burst delay is reduced in the DC system as long as the bursts can be re-ordered in receiving services. The delay reduction is present as long as the queuing system is stable, regardless of the scheduling algorithms. Proof The service time of a burst is reduced by half. Now lets prove the waiting time is also reduced using the sample path argument. Lets find an arbitrary time period during which one burst is served on Carrier 1 in the 2xSC system. During the
AbstractThe newly standardized Dual-Carrier HSDPA offers two-carrier aggregation on the downlink. In this paper, we investigate the performance gains from the dual-carrier operations with both full buffer and bursty traffic models. With full buffer traffic, dual-carrier offers dynamic load balancing and increase in user data rate, system capacity and spectral efficiency. All the users throughout the system enjoy the data rate increase. With bursty traffic, dual-carrier provides substantial gain in user experience measured by burst rates or latency under all loading conditions. Moreover, the gain with bursty traffic is universal not only for all the users but also for a very wide range of scheduling algorithms. Our results are based on analysis and extensive simulations. Design issues are also addressed in this paper. Index TermsWCDMA, HSPA, HSPA+, multi-carrier, queuing, scheduling, system capacity, bursty traffic, Proportional Fair
I.

INTRODUCTION

CDMA is the most popular choice for 3G cellular systems. After its initial release in 1999[1], the air interface has been subsequently enhanced. Examples include the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and Enhanced Uplink (EUL, also called High Speed Uplink Packet Access, or HSUPA) which introduce fast packet switch data services in the downlink and uplink respectively [2]. Recently, HSDPA/HSUPA has been further strengthened by backward compatible HSPA+ (including higher-order modulation, MIMO, multi-carrier, discontinuous transmission/reception, fast serving cell changes, etc) as well as the new OFDMAbased Long Term Evolution, or LTE [3]. Each enhancement offers substantial improvements in data rates, user experience and capacity. One of the most important features in HSPA+ is the Dual-Cell (aka Dual-Carrier) HSDPA (DC HSDPA) introduced in WCDMA Rel.8 [13]. In DC HSDPA, two adjacent downlink carriers, each of 5 MHz, are combined to provide a pipe of 10 MHz. In addition to peak rate increase, DC HSDPA offers substantial benefit in both user experience and system capacity. Economically, DC HSDPA boasts backward compatibility and feasibility for software-only upgrade. In this paper, we evaluate the DC HSDPA performance with both full buffer and bursty traffic models. A fair comparison is between a system with two separately operated carriers (2xSC) and a system with two carriers aggregated (DC), each having the same offered load. Compared to a single-carrier user, a DC HSDPA user enjoys higher data rates and lower
1 All the authors are with Qualcomm Inc., 5775 Morehouse Drive, San Diego, CA 92121. All correspondence should be addressed to Danlu Zhang (Phone: 858-6582703, fax: 858-8451254, e-mail: dzhang@qualcomm.com).

978-1-4244-2519-8/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

same time, some bursts may be served on Carrier 2. In the DC system, the services are reordered so that for each burst on Carrier 2, the service starts at the same time as in the 2xSC system, and the original burst on Carrier 1 is served whenever the server is available. If both carriers in 2xSC are fully loaded during this period, the finishing times in DC for all bursts on Carrier 2 are advanced while that of the burst on Carrier 1 is unchanged. If Carrier 2 is not fully loaded during this period, all bursts are finished earlier. One example of the service re-ordering is shown in Figure 1.

where t is service time with E[t]=T. In M/G/1 with (2, T/2), delay is cut in half under all loading with T<1. The half delay reduction can also be easily verified in the M/G/1 system with multiple traffic classes of either preemptive or non-preemptive priorities, and FIFO scheduling within each class[8]. D. 3GPP Bursty traffic model and performance metric 1) Bursty traffic model To capture the bursty traffic sources like e-mails and FTP downloads from multiple users, the following simple model is used in 3GPP standardization: the burst size is log-normally distributed similar to the FTP traffic model in [9]; the interburst time is the time between the arrivals of two consecutive bursts and is exponentially distributed.
Distribution Para-meters Mean = 0.5 MB Std. Dev. = 0.18 MB Max = 1.25 MB PDF

t ' 2 = t 2 / 4 . It is easy to see that the average total burst

Figure 1 Earlier finishing times in the DC system. B. M/G/1 with general scheduling If the inter-arrival times are exponentially distributed, as in the common Poisson processes, we can prove the precise reduction in the average burst delay is 50% in a DC system. Now the 2xSC system is modeled as two parallel M/G/1 systems with (,T) and separate queues. The DC system is modeled as a queuing system serving both incoming streams. Conjecture 1 Assuming T<1, the DC system is an M/G/1 system with (2,T/2) if the two carriers in DC always serve the same burst simultaneously. The average total burst delay in a DC system is half of that in the 2xSC system as long as the same scheduling algorithm is used in DC as in each of the two SC systems, and the scheduling algorithm does not depend on absolute time. Justification Since the combination of two Poisson processes is Poisson with the arrival rates summed together [8], the DC system is M/G/1 with (2,T/2). The delay reduction of half is based on time-compression. Let the clock for the M/G/1 system with (2,T/2) system run twice fast. All the arrival events in the (2,T/2) system have the same probability as in one (,T) system. Since the two carriers are always used together for one burst, which is chosen by the same scheduling algorithm, which is not dependent on the absolute time, all the scheduling events in the (2,T/2) system have the same probability as in the (,T) system. Hence the departure events have the same probability. Therefore, the (2,T/2) system is statistically identical to the (,T) system, which implies the average total burst delay in the (2,T/2) system is half of that in the (,T) system. This conjecture is verified in our simulations. C. Examples of M/G/1 systems The above conjecture is widely applicable. As an example, if FIFO or Round-Robin scheduling is used, the total average burst delay, Ttotal, can be computed by the Pollaczek-Khinchin (P-K) formula [8]:

File size (S)

Truncated Lognormal

fx = x0

1 2 x

exp

(ln x )2 , 2 2

= 0.35, = 13.061
Interburst time Exponential Mean = 20 sec
f x = e x ,x 0

= 0.05

2) Burst Rate For the bursty traffic, the average burst rate is used as the primary performance metric. For a burst, the burst rate Rburst is defined as R burst = s / t , where s is the burst size and t is the total burst delay, which is the time difference between the burst arriving at the Node B and the completion of all the data transmission over the air interface. The total burst delay includes both the transmission time and queue waiting time. The system-wide average burst rate is

s R burst = E . t

(2)

This definition has close connection with the user perceived data rates. However, in queuing theory, as seen in Section 2, only the average total burst delay, i.e., E[t], is well defined. This implies that the average burst rate should be defined as

R burst ,theory =

E[ s] . E[t ]

(3)

Comparing these two definitions, we have

Lemma 2

R burst R burst , theory . The equality is attained only

Ttotal = T +

t 2 2(1 T )

(1)

if all the users have the same constant channel condition and there is at most one burst in the system at any time. Proof The random variable t can be separated into three parts: file size(s), channel gain(g) and loading conditions: t = s g f (load) ,

where g can be dependent on s; f(load) is a function on loading, which depends on s, arrival rate and scheduling. Now we have s 1 s R burst = E = E E s = E sE s t t t

throughput with time constant Tthrpt . This is the classic Proportional Fair (P-Fair) scheduler [5][6] achieving multiuser diversity while maintaining roughly equal time share among the users. In DC HSDPA, the joint scheduling algorithm uses the following modified priority metric for User k on Carrier i:

1 1 = E sE s = E E s ( load ) ( load ) s g f g f 1 E[s] E[ s ] = = = R burst ,theory . E[ g f (load) | s ] E[ s ]E[ g f (load) | s ] E[t ]

We have used the Jensens inequality on 1/x. The equality is attained only when both g and f(load) are constant. With multiple bursts in queue, f(load)is generally not a constant. R burst , theory can easily be analyzed by queuing theory but R burst can not. However, the reduction in total delay implies:
Conjecture 2 R burst is half in the DC system of M/G/1 with (2, T/2) compared with 2x SC system, each carrier/server of M/G/1 with (, T). This is true for all the scheduling algorithms satisfying the conditions in Conjecture 1. Justification The path loss g is halved. The time compression and sample-path arguments in proving Conjecture 1 can also be applied to R burst .

Priority(i , k) =

rrequest ,i ( k ) , ~ (k ) r

(5)

where rrequest , i is the requested data rate of User k on Carrier i and ~ r ( k ) is the total average served rate over both carriers. In our simulation in this paper, there is no need to differentiate the services provided to SC and DC since there is no mixture of SC and DC users. The joint scheduler chooses the user of highest priority on each carrier to be transmitted on that carrier. There is no guarantee that the same user will be scheduled on both carriers simultaneously. For bursty traffic, there is a loss in delay performance [11], but this can be compensated by the multiuser diversity. Comparing with a 2x SC system with N users on each carrier, the DC scheduler can choose from 2*N users whereas the SC scheduler on each carrier can only choose from N users. Therefore, higher multi-user diversity is achieved. In addition, each users channel conditions on the two carriers are not always correlated, creating frequency diversity. The improved multi-user diversity compounded with frequency diversity provides spectral efficiency enhancement in DC HSDPA. Information exchange between the carriers is needed to compute ~ r ( k ) . Other information can also be shared between the carriers. However, our experience showed that the performance is insensitive to more information sharing. In addition, the extra multi-user diversity can be achieved even by an independent scheduler on each carrier using Eqn. (4) without computing the joint throughput. Furthermore, as shown in [7], the P-Fair Scheduler tends to provide higher gain to users with higher variability in the requested data rates. The typical data rate-SINR function is nonlinear, as in the Shannon capacity formula [4]. Therefore, with the same fading model, across time and frequency, the cell edge users see higher variation in their requested data rates than the users at cell center. Consequently, the cell edge users enjoy higher gain in data rate and spectral efficiency. DC HSDPA also offers dynamic load balancing. In reality, the carrier association in the single carrier system is not always balanced between the carriers. This imbalance is also an emulation of the common phenomena with bursty traffic. The DC operation automatically balances the load between the carriers and improves fairness. When the schedulers in (4) or (5) are applied to bursty traffic, the burst delay is not fully described by the analytical results in Section II. The actual performance is studied in Section IV through simulations.

III. MULTI-CARRIER SCHEDULER DESIGN In Section II, we have shown that burst rate gain is insensitive to the scheduling algorithm. However, the absolute performance in both the DC and 2xSC systems depends on the scheduler. Furthermore, the spectral efficiency for full buffer traffic is sensitive to the schedulers. Therefore, discussion on the scheduler design will facilitate the subsequent discussions on the simulation results. In this paper, we assume all the Node B downlink schedulers have joint-queues for both carriers. This avoids extra out-oforder packet delivery due to different channel conditions between the two carriers. Since the bursty traffic as in Section II.D.1 is treated as best effort, we use the same scheduler for both full buffer and the bursty traffic. Although this may not be optimized for the bursty traffic, as seen in Section II, the relative performance gain of DC is largely invariant to the scheduling algorithm. The users are transmitted in a TDM fashion so that each user can be scheduled at the peaks of their channel conditions to maximize the multi-user diversity. For each TTI, the scheduler chooses the user of highest priorities after sorting all the users, trading off capacity and fairness. In a single-carrier system, for User k with request data rate rrequest ( k ) , its scheduling priority is determined as:

Priority(k) =

rrequest (k ) . ~ r (k )

(4)

~ (k ) = (1 1 / T )~ Here r is the filtered thrpt r ( k ) + (1 / Tthrpt ) r ( k )

IV. SIMULATIONS A. Simulation framework We follow the framework used in 3GPP standardization [2]. A subset of assumptions is listed here.
Parameters Cell Layout Inter-site distance Carrier Frequency Path Loss Log Normal Fading Channel Model Penetration loss CPICH Ec/Ior Values and comments Hexagonal grid, 19 Node B, 3 sectors per Node B with wrap-around 1000 m 2000 MHz L=128.1 + 37.6log10(R), R in kilometers Std Deviation : 8dB, Inter-Node B Correlation: 0.5, Intra-Node B Correlation :1.0 Correlation Distance: 50m PA3, Fading across carriers is independent 10 dB -10 dB Up to 15 SF 16 codes per carrier for HSPDSCH Total power for HS-PDSCH and HS-SCCH is 70% of Node B Tx power HS-SCCH transmit power driven by 1% HSSCCH error HS-PDSCH HARQ: IR based. Max. 4 transmissions with 10% target BLER after the 1st transmission. Retransmissions have priority. 9 slot CQI delay with realistic CQI estimation Error-free CQI and ACK decoding 15 SF 16 codes capable per carrier LMMSE equalizer with receive diversity and realistic C/I estimation 43 dBm per carrier OCNS=1, namely, all other sectors always transmit at full power. Same on both carriers
20 (%)
20

Sector Throughput (Mbps) Vs Users per Sector

15

10

2x SC DC

0 0 5 10

Users per sector

15

20

25

30

35

Figure 2 Sector capacity gain in DC HSDPA.

Throughput Gains vs. user throughput percentile
60 2 Users per sector 4 Users per sector 8 Users per sector 16 Users per sector

40

0 0 20 40 60 User Percentile 80 100

HS-DSCH

Figure 3 User throughput gains of DC-HSDPA over 2xSCHSDPA as a function of user percentile C. Simulation results on the gain with bursty traffic Figure 4 shows the two average burst rates and R
burst , theory

HS-DPCCH UE capabilities UE Receiver Type Maximum Sector Transmit Power Other Sector Transmit Power Serving cell

in 2xSC. The R

burst , theory

R burst computed by the P-K

formula (Eqn.(1)) is also plotted, with the values of T and through simulations. This computed t 2 obtained R ' burst , theory assumes Round-Robin scheduling. The simulated are larger than R ' burst , theory , indicating that the PFair Scheduler offers shorter delay than Round Robin. Furthermore, R burst > R burst , theory in all loading.
R
burst , theory

B. Gains with full buffer traffic Figure 2 shows the improvement of system capacity, measured by sector throughput, from DC HSDPA. For both 2xSC and DC-HSDPA, we compare the sector throughputs at the same number of users per sector and balanced number of users per carrier in 2xSC. The DC gain is more pronounced at low number of users and decrease as the number of users increases. This is a manifestation of the multi-user diversity gain through the P-Fair scheduler. As mentioned in Section III, the cell edge users experience higher percentage of throughput increase. This is seen clearly in Figure 3 where the user throughput gain is plotted against user throughput percentile. At low percentiles (cell edge), the gains are higher than at high percentiles (cell center). This is because cell edge users see a higher variation in their requested data rate than the cell center users. Henceforth, DC improves fairness compared to 2xSC.

Figure 5 shows the CDF of burst rates with 8 users per sector. Note that there are 8 users in 10 MHz for both 2xSC and DCHSDPA. We see that all the users experience approximately 2x improvements in the burst rates in DC HSDPA compared to 2xSC-HSDPA, regardless of their locations. Figure 6 shows the average burst rate as a function of number of users per sector. The average burst rate in DC shows approximately 2x gain over a wide range of loads. The gain is not exactly twice as predicted by our analysis mainly due to the time and frequency variation of user channel quality. On one hand, our DC scheduler may not always serve the same burst on both carriers, resulting in a loss in delay performance [11]. On the other hand, the additional multi-user and frequency diversity boost the DC performance. These two factors play opposite roles.

5 4.5 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 0 0.2 0.4

BR E(burst-size/burst-time) BR E(burst-size)/E(burst-time) Burst Rate (PK Formula)

0.6

0.8

Figure 4 Comparison of different definition of burst rates: xaxis is slot utilization, and y-axis is burst rate in Mbps.

higher gain. With bursty traffic, DC provides nearly twice the burst rate or half of the delay. Furthermore, the gain with bursty traffic is applicable over a wide range of schedulers under all stable loading conditions. Such gain can also be seen by the increased system capacity in offering service at a given burst rate. DC HSDPA also improves system capacity in offering delaysensitive video services. This will be presented in the future. DC HSDPA are further extended in both downlink and uplink in WCDMA Release 9. More detailed study on these extensions will be presented in the future. Our future work also includes comparing the performance of DC-HSDPA to HSDPA with MIMO.
Cap Gain

Cap Gain (%)

1000 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 0 1

BR in 2xSC (Mbps)

Figure 5 Burst Rate CDF for 8 users per sector.

Burst Rate
70 60 50 # users/sector 40 30 20 10 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 Burst Rate (Mbps) 2xSC DC

Figure 7 Capacity gain in offering burst rates.

REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] H. Holma and A. Toskala, WCDMA for UMTS: Radio Access for Third Generation Mobile Communications, 3 ed, Wiley, 2004. H. Holma and A. Toskala, HSDPA/HSUPA for UMTS: High Speed Radio Access for Mobile Communications, Wiley, 2006. E. Dahlman, S. Parkvall, J. Skold and P. Beming, 3G Evolution: HSPA and LTE for Mobile Broadband, 2nd ed., Academic Press, 2008. D. Tse and P. Viswanath, Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, Cambridge University Press, 2005. F. Kelly, Charging and Rate Control for Elastic Traffic, in European Trans. On Telecommunications, vol.8, pp33-7,1997. A. Jalali, R.Padovani and R.Pankaj, Data throughput of CDMA-HDR a high efficiency-high data rate personal communication wireless system, in VTC, vol.3,pp1854-8, spring, 2000. J. M.. Holtzman, Asymptotic analysis of proportional fair algorithm, in 12th IEEE Intl Symp. on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Comm. , 2001. Dimitri P. Bertsekas and R. Gallager, Data Networks, 2ed. 3GPP Spec TR 25.896: Feasibility Study for Enahnced Uplink for UTRA FDD, 2004. R. Attar, D. Ghosh, C. Lott, M. Fan, P. Black and R. Rezaiifar, Evolution of cdma2000 cellular networks: multicarrier EV-DO, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 44, Iss 3, March, 2006. Peter Brucker , Scheduling Algorithm, Springer-Verlag Berlin, 1995. Manohar Naidu Ellanti, Steven Scott Gorshe, Lakshmi G. Raman, Wayne D. Grover, Next Generation Transport Networks: Data, Management, and Control Planes, Springer, 2005. 3GPP TS 25.308, High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), Release 8.

Figure 6 Burst rate performance with OCNS=1. The capacity in offering bursty traffic can be defined as the number of users supportable at a particular burst rate. In Figure 7, the capacity gain from DC is plotted against the burst rate in the 2x SC system. At low load (small number of users, or high burst rate achievable by 2xSC), the gain is very large. This indicates that DC can offer the same burst rate under heavy loading while 2xSC can only offer it under light loading. At the limit of low load/high burst rate, the capacity gain of DC over 2xSC approaches infinite because there are burst rates which are possible only in DC but not in 2xSC. In summary, the simulations show that for a given number of users, DC HSDPA can provide approximately twice the burst rate; at the same burst rate, DC HSDPA can support more users than 2x SC. V. CONCLUSION Our analysis and simulations showed substantial benefit from DC HSDPA in user experience and system performance. With full buffer traffic and P-Fair scheduler, the multi-user and frequency diversity provide gains in both user data rate and system capacity/spectral efficiency. Cell edge users enjoy