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Nokia Telecommunications, Radio Access Systems, P.O. Box 300, FIN-00045 Nokia Group, Finland. Email:antti.toskala@ntc.nokia.com

Nokia Mobile Phones, P.O. Box 86, FIN-24101 Salo, Finland. Email: otto.lehtinen@nokia.com
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UTRA standardisation is proceeding from the description phase to the specification phase in 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project)[1] where the UTRA work from ETSI has been shifted as well together with 3rd generation cellular systems standardisation activities from several other standardisation organisations, such as ARIB, TTA, TTC and T1P1. One of the topics in the air interface standardisation were active work is going on at the moment is the handover between UTRA and GSM. This topic have been also studied within ACTS FRAMES with in connection to FMA2 WCDMA [2] work, prior discussions in standardisation, where work is progressing for detailed specification. This paper focuses on the UTRA FDD handover to GSM, which is considered more difficult direction compared to handover from GSM to UTRA FDD. Many of the general principles are applicable to UTRA TDD mode as well. More specifically the differences between handover to GSM 900 and GSM 1800 are described along with their implications to UTRA performance.

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For handover from UTRA FDD, the first thing to solve is how to make measurements from GSM when in active mode in UTRA. Basically from the radio point of view two options exists, being: Slotted Mode Dual Receiver Both of them take the advantage of the UTRA 720 ms multi-frame which allows to have measurement patterns similar inside GSM as with the GSM 51 multi-frame solution. From the UTRA side especially with the more implementation friendly slotted mode options, parts of the frame will be slotted frame, i.e. providing silent period on the UTRA downlink by compressing the transmission in time with higher spreading factor or by increasing the coding rate. As use of the slotted frames generally causes certain degradation, its use should be reduced to minimum. For this there exists a possibility if there is timing information available between UTRA network and GSM network as the use of slotted mode is network controlled. With sufficient timing information it is possible to tell the mobile explicitly together with slotted frame allocation which GSM carrier to go and measure. This causes significant reduction to the need of slotted mode in UTRA. The GSM FCH/SCH have a different timing structure compared to UTRA, but they meet at longer time span as indicated in Figure 1, which contains GSM superframe relation to UTRA timing. This makes periodic GSM carrier specific measurement patterns possible with small slotted frame occurrence. There exists several ways of providing the timing information between the networks, with one of the easiest cases being with highly integrated networks.

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As seen from Figure 2 the GSM 1800 (formerly DCS 1800) band is relatively close to the UTRA FDD uplink frequency band. This causes the practical restriction that the use of slotted mode is needed to make measurements from GSM 1800 also in the uplink direction. This is due the mobile not being able to provide sufficient isolation between its own transmitter and receiver when operating in GSM 1800 frequency band while UTRA transmitter is active.
1710 GSM1800 UPLINK 1785 1805 GSM1800 DOWNLINK 1880 1900 1920 UTRA FDD UPLINK 1980 2010 2025 2110 UTRA FDD DOWNLINK 2180
DECT UTRA RX/TX TDD RX/TX UTRA TDD RX/TX

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In typical link level study the power control dynamics are assumed to be infinite, which corresponds to the situation elsewhere but not at the cell edge. As can be seen from the Figure 3, the impact of the uplink slotted mode to the BER curves in terms of the average required Eb/No is not significant.

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)LJXUH  7UDGLWLRQDO %(5 YV (E1 FXUYHV ZLWK LQILQLWH SRZHU FRQWURO G\QDPLFV The situation in the Figure 3. correspond to a typical case as most terminals in the cell are not the power limited situation, which is even more true when considering micro cell environment. In Figure 4. the impact of the uplink slotted mode to the UTRA FDD coverage is presented with the so-called headroom vs. received Eb/N0 curves. These show the effect of slotted mode from coverage point of view analysing the case when mobiles are in the power limited situation at the cell edge. This corresponds typically to the mobiles in the macro cellular environment at the edge of the UTRA coverage area where soft hand over is not possible. In the curves the headroom and the received Eb/N0 are defined as: Headroom = max TX power over the whole simulation(dB) average RX power during the non-slotted frames (dB) Eb/N0 (RX) = average received Eb/N0 during the non-slotted frames (dB) The headroom is needed in the link budgets. When the mobile is at the cell edge, it can not any more use the full dynamic range for the power control, but instead it has to increase the target Eb/N0 for the power control because the allowed headroom over the average transmit power is decreased.

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)LJXUH  6SHHFK VHUYLFH KHDGURRP YV (E1 ! HIIHFW RI VORWWHG PRGH IURP FRYHUDJH SRLQW RI YLHZ From the results in can be seen that especially with 1/3-rate coding the impact of slotted mode to the headroom is less than 1 dB, while with the -coding the impact is higher. For the simulation case an example slotted mode pattern with 1 slotted frame in every 8th frames was selected. The simulation parameters were selected as follows: Channel model: ITU Pedestrian A, speed 3km/h, with antenna diversity Power control: step 1 dB, 1 slot delay with 1 % command errors in the downlink direction

Service and channel coding parameters: Speech 8 kbit/s with 10 ms interleaving and convolutional coding with following cases: a) 1/3 (normal frame)+1/3 coding (slotted frame) spreading factor is halved during the compressed transmission transmission power was raised by 3 dB during the compressed transmission b) 1/3 (normal frame)+1/2 coding (slotted frame) spreading factor is the same during normal and compressed frame transmission power is the same during normal and compressed frame also the location of the slot between the middle and end of the frame was varied Figure 5. illustrates the three different coding schemes that were simulated. The performance of the different downlink options has been studied for example in [3], were impact is small if the slotted frames are not used too frequently.

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From the studies for inter-system handover and especially uplink slotted mode, following can be concluded: the effect to the link performance is marginal when the terminal is not in the transmission power limited case such as in the system coverage area edge. The performance degradation increases as the terminal approaches the coverage edge. From the overall system capacity point of view the impact is not significant as also in the normal operation with continuous coverage soft handover alleviates the problems related to power limitations. Also it should be noted that the channel model used is the most sensitive one to impacts due to the slotted mode. It offers very little diversity gain, which highlight the power limitation impacts. For UTRA GSM handover the use of slotted mode can be minimised with timing information between UTRA and GSM. For the hand over to GSM 1800 and to UTRA TDD, slotted mode will be needed in the uplink direction due to the close proximity of the frequency bands. The impact of such and operation with up to every 8th frame in slotted mode was studied and it was found that with proper coding scheme the impact is rather marginal for practical ranges, less than 1dB. Finally it should be noted, that uplink slotted mode operation should not be a continuos procedure. It should be used only, when there is a clear need to make a intersystem handover, e.g. in order to get the coverage from some other system.

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The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of their ACTS Project FRAMES AC090 colleagues from Siemens AG, Roke Manor Research Limited, Ericsson Radio Systems AB, Nokia Corporation, the Technical University of Delft, the University of Oulu, France Telecom CNET, CSEM - Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique SA, ETHZ - Eidgenssische Technische Hochschule Zrich, the University of Kaiserslautern, Chalmers University of Technology AB, the Royal Institute of Technology, the Instituto Superior Tcnico, and Integracion y Sistema de Medida. References [1] www.3gpp.org [2] A.Toskala et al, "FRAMES FMA2 Wideband-CDMA for UMTS", European transactions on telecommunications, vol. 9 no. 4, pp 325-336, July/August 1998 [3] M.Gustafsson et al. Compressed mode techniques for inter-frequency measurements in wideband DS-CDMA system IEEE PIMRC97 September 1997, Helsinki, Finland.