Introduction To Practical LTE Small Cell Dimensioning v1.6.3

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Unit or Department: Network Engineering Author: Roman Arcea Document type: Whitepaper Date: 15/03/2012
Unique document identifier (ID) Version number: 1.6 Life cycle status For internal use
Whitepaper
Network Engineering For internal use only, 15/03/2012
Introduction to Practical LTE Small Cell Dimensioning

Radio Capacity and User Behavior
Table of contents
Reasoning......................................................................................... 2 Radio Inputs...................................................................................... 3

LTE Maximum Throughput Theory ................................................................................. 3 Small Cell Sites and Practical Dimensioning................................................................... 5
Market and Marketing ..................................................................... 10 User Behavior, Applications and Backhaul...................................... 12 Conclusions .................................................................................... 13 References ..................................................................................... 14 Annex A simulation assumptions ................................................. 15
Homogeneous Scenario ............................................................................................... 15 Heterogeneous Scenario .............................................................................................. 15
Author: Roman Arcea, MBB CS Network Engineering Radio Simulations: Krzysztof Wascinski, MBB CS Network Engineering Owner and Contributor: Tamas Major, IP Transport Solutions
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Reasoning
This whitepaper will cover reasoning, user behavior, radio perspective and over dimensioning related to deployment of small cell sites. Though the summary is targeted at small cell sites, most of the ideas are applicable to any type of mobile access. There e are multiple reasons to introduce small cell site solutions. Some of the key reasons are shown below. All of them are meant to improve end user satisfaction.
Capacity
Urban Areas, Stadiums, Student Dorms
Coverage
Shopping Malls, Underground Pubs, Subway
Regulatory
Visual restrictions, Power restrictions
ailored Services
!ome and "nterprise locations
While all of the above are valid reasons, increase of capacity stands out as the most typical use e case. The increase of capacity itself could be split in at least two use cases: Inside buildings: deployment eployment of small cell sites (Micro, Pico, either as standalone or as part of a Flexi Zone concept) in a highly overloaded area student dorm, a skyscrapper, a popular underground space Open space pace: utility pylons in hot zones
Deployment inside buildings, buildings besides esides increasing capacity will always benefit coverage, overcoming the shortcomings of macro site radio propagation and bringing the radio closer r to the end users. Deployment in an open space is usually characterized by a single scope to increase the average throughput per customer. Examples of such areas could be utility pylons, meeting places, shopping spaces, campuses. The target audiences for this whitepaper are NSN technical and sales teams. The whitepaper tries to provide a more practical perspective on transport requirements based on simulating the real environment and its constraints in terms of number of customers, radio environment and resource re sharing.
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Radio Inputs
LTE Maximum Throughput Theory
The theoretical maximum throughput on a single 20MHz carrier in LTE is 150Mbps ([1]). This value does not take into account signaling overhead and assumes perfect channel conditions where dual stream MIMO has 100% gain. In practice, with 1 UE located on the cell, the peak drops to ~90Mbps (Picture 1), due to retransmissions, fading and varying radio performance. In a fully loaded macro cell with customers uniformly distributed inside the coverage area, including the cell edge, the maximum expected average throughput in the urban environment goes down to 35Mbps per cell, while the peak rate would hardly go beyond 50Mbps per cell (Picture 1). The assumption of the average throughput and one theoretical peak rate is at the base of the macro cell site transport dimensioning when no user traffic profile is available (see reference [3] at the end of the paper).
Picture 1: CDF higher probability value means lower probability to achieve the throughput. Throughput distribution in a homogeneous scenario (User data throughput at L3 SDU). Signaling throughput not considered 20 MHz bandwidth. Red: 1 UE per cell; Blue: 10 UEs per cell. [Annex A simulation assumptions
Dimensioning based on averages and peaks is a common practice among vendors and leads to over dimensioning; hence in the initial deployment stage the number of UEs on the cell is not enough to congest the cell and load the transport interface of the BTS. In a small cell environment, under ideal conditions, the expected maximum average throughput shall be higher. This is due to higher spectrum efficiency resulting from better usage of the available resources and better channel conditions, which is however only applicable when the interference from the neighboring cells is reasonably low.
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Picture 2 shows a comparison of spectral efficiencies in ITU-R ITU Macrocell and Microcell
environments (3GPP TR 36.814 V9.0.0). Based on 3GPP study, in a microcell environment the spectral efficiency is 25% higher than in macrocell environment.
Urban Microcell Scheme and antenna configuration DL MU-MIMO 4 x 2 (C) DL CS/CB-CoMP 4 x 2 (C) UL Rel-8 SIMO 1 x 4 (C) Cell average [b/s/Hz/cell] L=1 3.5 3.6 L=2 3.2 3.3 1.9 L=3 2.9 3.0 Urban Macrocell Cell average [b/s/Hz/cell] L=1 2.8 2.9 L=2 2.6 2.6 1.5 L=3 2.4 2.4 L=1 125% 124% Ratio Micro:macro L=2 123% 127% 127% L=3 121% 125%
average #$%& #$'& #$(& #$'&
Picture 2: Comparison of cell spectral efficiencies in ITU-R ITU R Macrocell and Microcell environments Source: Small Cell Backhaul Requirements by the NGMN Alliance environments.
Picture 3 shows estimations for small cell performance as achieved by NGMN. It
represents a summary of different configurations and expected throughputs for the small cells on the backhaul interface including overheads.
Picture 3: : Backhaul Traffic Characteristics for LTE Small Cells in various configurations. Source: Small Cell Backhaul Requirements by the NGMN Alliance
As can be seen NGMN presented simulations match nicely the results achieved by NSNs system level simulations. s
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Small Cell Sites and Practical Dimensioning

In a more practical dimensioning scenario based on a simulation with a 10MHz carrier, if the small cell is improperly located, it would create areas of high interference at the cell edge reducing the effective benefit of a small cell. For example Picture 4 presents the scenario where small cells are not isolated from macro cell, thus effective average cell throughput is lowered for both macro and micro, when more small cells are added. The clear trend is that total average cell throughput is decreased, but there are more users with higher throughput per UE. Due to the fact that small cells bandwidth is divided among fewer customers then in the macro case site, it is more probable to achieve higher throughput per customer.
Picture 4: Throughput Distribution in a Heterogeneous Scenario. 10 MHz bandwidth. Blue: macro only reference scenario; Others: macro with different #of Pico cells (30dBm) per macro cell area. [Annex A simulation assumptions
In the field, the number of users served by a small cell is determined by many environmental parameters. Picture 5 shows reference average number of simultaneous users served for different configurations and frequency bands according to heterogeneous scenario simulations performed. When the propagation conditions become better in lower bands the small cell coverage becomes wider, increasing the number of captured users. Please note that the results are relevant for the scenario with uniform distribution of UEs in the area (no hot spots).
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Picture 5: : Average number of simultaneous users in a small cells Heterogeneous scenario. Macro 40 W; Uniform UE distribution bution (25 per macro cell area) [Annex A simulation assumptions
The uniform UE distribution scenario (Picture5) has been taken as a baseline for comparison with a hot spot scenario that is likely to be encountered in the field.
Picture 6 represents the reference area with hot spots modeled following 3GPP TR
36.814.
Picture 6: UE Positions in the the Simulations with Hot Spots according to 3GPP TR36.814
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In hot spots, user density is achieved by increasing the concentration probability of UE in a radius of 40m by a factor of 30x.
Picture7 shows a comparison of average number of users being served in macro and micro cell in a heterogeneous scenario, where uniform UE distribution (blue) is taken as a comparison baseline to a Hot Spot simulation (red).
Picture 7: Average number of users in a Heterogeneous Scenario: macro compared to small cell; Macro 40 W; Pico 1W. Uniform UE Distribution versus 30x Probability Hot Spot Distribution
The simulations with hot spots are aimed to show the network performance with higher density of users around the small cells. Picture 7 shows a comparison of average number of users served in the cells in two scenarios with and without hot spots. The trend shows that increasing the clustering probability by 30 times results in small cells capturing 11 UEs in average compared to previous 1.6 UEs for the baseline uniform UE distribution. At the same time the average number of macro users around hot spots is increased as a result of the circular nature of the hot spot which is not fully covered by the small cell. This results in some users on the edge of the circle being out of small cell coverage area and served by a macro cell.
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Picture 8: Cell Throughput in a Heterogeneous Scenario: Pico 1W. Uniform UE Distribution versus 30x Probability Hot spot Distribution Picture 8 shows throughput results for small cell simulation with and without hot spots. As can be clearly seen, clustering increases the efficiency of small cell resource usage thanks to bigger number of served user located close to the center of the small cell. This results in an increased overall network performance.
As seen from Picture 8, under uniform UE distribution the small cell efficiency is lower compared to hot spot scenario. In Picture 9 we are showing by how much this degradation is impacting the small cell throughput due to high interference at the cell edge. This is the expected behavior related to physical characteristics of the radio. New features such as 3GPP rel.10 eICIC should lower this impact. The basic idea of the feature is to reduce the downlink inter-cell interference generated by a macro cell to a UE in a small cell by introducing so called 'almost blank subframes' (ABS) in the macro cell. As a result macro cell time-domain resources are lowered, but small cells users experience far less interference.
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Picture 9: Throughput Increase in the Coverage Area (21 macro cells + # of small cells). Total area throughput = sum of all average throughputs from referenced cells 0 (check Picture 10)
When operators are running low on air interface capacity they typically will try to address this by upgrading the macro BTS layer as shown in below steps, before considering deploying small cells. Under current technological circumstances, the small cells are to be seen as the ultimate and main solution to increase area capacity beyond macro cell based network capabilities.
)ncrease Macro Density
Upgrade to Second or hird Carrier
Upgrade to a *+cell Con,iguration
)ntroduce Small Cell Sites
While the above would vary case by case, one should have a general sense of both market and marketing to get the transport dimensioning in a right way.
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Market and Marketing

LTE is a new technology. It will take at least some time for an operator deploying LTE services to reach comparable to 3G amount of saturation. One of the key issues is the lack of LTE capable UEs. The expected lifecycle of a user equipment being ~2 years, it will take at least 2-3 years for operators deploying now to actually get the same amount of customers using both 3G and LTE technologies and this, only under ideal conditions. Hence usage of voice with LTE is still not the norm; the actual user adoption rate would probably be even slower. This is the state of the market. On the other side there is marketing. Marketing is all about showing the supremacy of one operator over the other, agility and capacity to launch state of the art networks in the key markets, sell the customer the expectation of something new that he would want to pay for. These requirements, though not technical, have a strong impact on the actual mobile backhaul dimensioning. In the key markets, for the lucky few using the LTE service (either as a part of a Friendly User Trial or actual commercial customers) a strong marketing requirement is to deliver the peak rates. This drives excessive requirements for the mobile backhaul. For instance, Elisa in Finland provisions as much as 450Mbps per BTS, T-Mobile Germany would give 300Mbps per BTS with further increase steps of 100Mbps. These exaggerated bandwidth requirements drive the fast migration from microwave radios to a fiber infrastructure and installing expensive equipment with high throughput capabilities. The benefit of over dimensioning at the early stages of deployment is questionable. In a shared transport environment with 2G/3G/LTE/Small Cell traffic carried over a single link the situation might be slightly different though. While the above represents the vision for a macro cell deployment, dimensioning for the small cell sites with the above perspective would make the economical exercise much more complicated, making it really hard to justify the business case. Assuming the growth perspective of LTE to reach saturation in key markets 2-3 years from the deployment, small cell sites would be a natural extension. A typical proposed small cell site in a hot spot area is supposed to cover a radius of ~50m. In co-channel deployment with lower power configuration this could drop to ~25m ([4]). This would naturally lead to a very small number of customers being under the coverage. By the time of deployment of a small cell site, the average peak throughput per customer on the macro site would be much lower than the initially advertised peak rate. It is up to the operator to decide what a reasonable service shall look like. The operator would either be able to understand that by himself proactively or reactively following the customer churn rates. Picture 10 shows the throughput distribution per customer in a macro cell with ~10 active users. Based on simulations (Picture 10), the expected average maximum throughput per customer is ~2,5Mbps (0.5 probability in the CDF).This includes higher average throughputs close to the cell center versus lower throughputs at the edge of the cell. Following the example from Picture 9, adding a small cell in an area where adding a new macro cell would be impractical will make the overall throughput for the area higher. Hence the small cell would be located in the hot spot it will capture an important part of the load of a macro cell (Picture 7), allowing the macro cell to serve better the cell edges. This shall generally equalize the customer experience improving the maximum average throughput per customer.
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Picture 10: Throughput distribution per user in a macro cell with 10 users (Blue: 10 users, Red: 1 user). [Annex A simulation assumptions
From a pure practical perspective the average throughput per customer is the only thing that really matters. The average throughput per customer will define the speed of opening web pages, loading Youtube videos or iTunes songs, using video conferencing and collaboration solutions and getting fast your pictures and home videos out of the cloud. This is why the dimensioning of the small cell site backhaul would strictly depend on the operators planning to deliver an average throughput per the active customer captured in the small cell site. Should last mile not be a cost problem, small cell could be fed the same amount of bandwidth as a macro site allowing for the peak rates. Depending on the area and the distribution pattern of UEs we can assist at several situations. For example, a Pico of low power is expected to serve not more than 2-3 active customers at once (in simulation with uniform user placement based on current statistics of Macro relative to coverage). Would you want to serve these customers a 50Mbps rate you shall dimension the transport accordingly. In practice, if the small cell sites are located in hot spot areas the actual number of active customers is hard to predict. As seen from our simulations, 11 UEs have been taken as a reference (Picture 7). Under this environment a rule of thumb might be to consider dimensioning the last mile for peak hour average. For example in a 10MHz scenario will result in 15Mbps + Overheads + Peak Rates (if needed) for the Pico scenario (Picture 8). While for the aggregation link, one might follow the existing proposal: Bandwidth = MAX(n x average, Peak). Beware though, this approach might lead to over dimensioning of the aggregation link as well.
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User Behavior, Applications and Backhaul

Deployment of small cell sites in hot zones would lead to capturing a part of the macro zone customers inside the small cell area. Not only will the customers be split but also the number of sessions they use to generate will be divided accordingly, allowing for more peak rates in the macro cell and increasing the overall satisfaction. Please note it is highly unlikely that adding cells to an area will also increase the presence of customers in this area. On the other hand one expectation might be that as soon as the overall user experience increases in the coverage spot, customers will start consuming more bandwidth by watching higher quality media and downloading more. While that might have been the case in an ideal world, this does not currently fit into operators plans. Users are restricted by data plan caps and tend to control the usage of data. This might change in the future, but shall be taken into account by the cost conscious operators that deploy today and want to keep initial CAPEX under control. From user behavior perspective it would still take a certain amount of time to open and read a web page or to watch a Youtube video and it is unlikely the customer to be able to watch a 4 minute video faster than in 4 minutes by simply having more bandwidth. More than that, simulations show that at least for web browsing, there is almost no benefit to user experience above specific thresholds. This is applicable to other services as well (Picture 11). Delay plays a significant role in web browsing experience, and might further reduce the benefit of high throughput.
4,0 3,5 3,0 Page Load Time [s] 2,5 200 2,0 1,5 1,0 0,5 0,0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Date Rate [Mbit/s] 600 1000
Picture 11: Web Browsing QoE as Function of User Service Data Rate
Flat rates are rare today. This means that, would the customer want to watch an HD video at a bit rate of just 5Mbps, it will take him a whopping 3.4GB of traffic to fully enjoy 90min of video. This makes the assumption of customers consuming higher quality media unlikely under the current market conditions that limit the customer to 1GB-5GB traffic per month. Pulling heavy media out of the cloud is unlikely for exactly the same reason. This is why, despite great consumer devices available on the market, the largest volumes of traffic are still consumed at home under Wi-Fi coverage connected to a flat rate fixed line.
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Conclusions
The whitepaper proposes a way to look at transport requirements from a more practical perspective. It shall allow for better understanding of the step wise approach that can be considered as a model for initial deployments. This can reduce the upfront investment in the infrastructure and allow on demand dimensioning through disciplined network monitoring. The following things are required to be done and understood: - Segment your market in high value, high priority zones and the rest. This is especially important for small cell site deployments to avoid initial upfront investment - Decide either serving peak rates, is part of your marketing strategy in high priority areas. Decide what to do with the other areas. - Understand the technical limitations of the technology, the theoretical versus practical peak rates. With small cell sites understand the impact of interference. Understand the differences between 20 MHz and 10 MHz carriers and how this makes a difference for the actual transport requirements. - Know your customer. Anticipate the behavior and match it against your sales plans - Shall you deploy a new network, take into account the time to introduce enough handsets that could take advantage of the transport capacity. A small cell site behaves the same way as a low power macro site. If a small cell site is introduced in an area with high customer density to increase throughput, understand to which extent user experience increase is expected. - Understand what financial indicators are important for you to have a positive business case. High CAPEX and lower OPEX at the start of the project or a more diluted CAPEX and TCO spread to several years at the expense of higher OPEX due to more often upgrades. Over dimensioning from the beginning will require high investment but will render future upgrades less critical. On the other hand dimensioning in a stepwise manner will make the CAPEX smaller at the beginning, while will also allow having the benefit of permanently falling prices per 1Gbps. This approach will require stricter monitoring and operational discipline, as well as might increase OPEX. These are just some of the things to be considered when taking dimensioning decisions for both macro and small cell sites.
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References
[1] [2] [3] [4]
http://www.3gpp.org/article/lte
NetEng materials, E-UTRAN Dimensioning Guideline NetEng materials, LTE Access Transport Dimensioning Guideline NetEng materials, Pico cell performance in HetNet. Simulations for LGU+, Krzysztof Wascinski, December 22, 2011 (link)
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Annex A simulation assumptions

Homogeneous Scenario
Parameter Layout Simulation time ISD eNB output power Number of UEs Mobility Penetration loss Receiver Frequency band Channel bandwidth Service DL Scheduler MCS Handover Overhead Maximum number of HARQ retransmissions Slow Fading Fast Fading MIMO settings Setting 21 cells, wrap around model 240s 500 80W 10 / 1 per cell Average UE speed 3km/h 20 dB 2Rx MRC at UE and eNB 1800 MHz 20 MHz Full buffer (100% load in all cells) NSN Smart Scheduler According to 3GPP TR 36.213 Based on path loss and slow fading PHY,RLC,MAC considered 3 Std. dev = 8 dB; corr. distance = 50 m TU3 2x2 CL-MIMO
Heterogeneous Scenario
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Parameter Layout Simulation time ISD Antennas (macro/pico eNB) Number of UEs Number of scheduled terminals Mobility Macro cell output power Small cell output power Penetration loss Receiver Frequency band Channel bandwidth Service DL Scheduler MCS Handover Slow Fading Fast Fading MIMO settings Min distance between small cell and macro cell Min distance between UE and macro cell Min distance between UE and small cell Min distance among small cells Small cell distribution within a macro cell UE distribution within a macro cell
Setting 3GPP HetNet 6.1 case according to TR 36.814 240s 500 TR 36.814 (pg 59) 14dBi / omnidirectional 5dBi 25/macro cell area 1425 in total 10UEs per cell (macro or small cell) Average UE speed 3km/h 40W Femto (250 mW); Pico (1W); Micro (5W) 20 dB 2Rx MRC at UE and eNB 800 MHz 10 MHz Full buffer (100% load in all cells) NSN Smart Scheduler According to 3GPP TR 36.213 Based on path loss and slow fading Std. dev = 8 dB; corr. distance = 50 m TU3 2x2 CL-MIMO >=75m >= 35m > 10m 40 m Uncorrelated Uniform
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Picture 10: Heterogeneous scenario layout random pico (1W) placement t (with distance constraints)

Introduction To Practical LTE Small Cell Dimensioning v1.6.3

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Introduction to Practical LTE Small Cell Dimensioning

Reasoning......................................................................................... 2 Radio Inputs...................................................................................... 3

average #$%& #$'& #$(& #$'&

Picture 3 shows estimations for small cell performance as achieved by NGMN. It

Small Cell Sites and Practical Dimensioning

)ncrease Macro Density

Upgrade to Second or hird Carrier

Upgrade to a *+cell Con,iguration

)ntroduce Small Cell Sites

Market and Marketing

User Behavior, Applications and Backhaul

Annex A simulation assumptions

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