Heterogeneous Network in LTE-Advanced System

Wan Lei Wu Hai (Invited) Yu Yinghui Zesong Fei

Beijing Institute of Technology Beijing, China traffic asymmetry and variation, which tries to utilize the spare UL spectrum resource for local DL access adaptive to the dynamic traffic statistics. II. HETNET MODELING AND EVALUATION METHODOLOGY Huawei Technology Ltd. Beijing, China
AbstractThis paper provides a thorough analysis of the frequency resource allocation among multi-layers of the intraRAT (Radio Access Technology) heterogeneous network. From the aspect of the spectrum utilization efficiency, the co-channel heterogeneous network provides higher system capacity, but its control channel coverage and quality is much worse than the orthogonal frequency allocation between macro cell and local cells. Enhancement of co-channel deployment are analyzed and evaluated such as range expansion and the Frequency Division Duplexing (FDM)/Time Division Duplexing (TDM) orthogonal control channel design. As a further step of evolution, an approach with dynamic spectrum sharing among macro cells and local cells are proposed to utilize the spared macro uplink resource in the downlink/uplink traffic asymmetric scenario for hotspot local DL access with well-designed interference management. Keywords- Heterogeneous network; dynamic spectrum sharing; cochannel allocation; orthogonal frequency allocation; LTEAdvanced

I.

INTRODUCTION

Heterogeneous deployments consist of deployments with more than one type of network nodes, i.e. HetNet is a very general concept, even covering inter-RAT network deployment. This paper mainly focuses on intra-RAT HetNet with low power nodes placed throughout a macro-cell layout. Referring to the 3GPP official Technical Report 36.814 [6], the local cell with associated low power nodes consists of macro, Pico, Home enhanced NodeB (HeNB) and relay nodes, as described in Table 1, with the typical macro eNB transmission power of 46dBm. HetNet performance is quite dependent on the concrete deployment scenarios, modeling, parameter setting and the other simulation assumptions. Table 2 shows the scenarios of outdoor Pico evaluations [6], where configuration 1 and 4 are widely used in 3GPP evaluations, with more detailed assumptions and parameters, e.g. propagation models referring to [6].
Table 1 Categorization of local cell nodes Node Type Total BS TX power Backhaul Access Case1: 24, 30 dBm@10MHz carrier Several s Remote radio Open to all Case3: 24, 30, 37 dBm@10MHz latency to head (RRH) UEs carrier(37dBm is outdoor only) macro Pico eNB Case1: 24, 30 dBm@10MHz Open to all X2 (node for Hot- Case3: 24, 30, 37 dBm@10MHz UEs zone cells) (37dBm is outdoor only) HeNB No X2 as Closed baseline Subscriber (node for Femto 20 dBm@10MHz carrier cells) (*) Group (CSG) Through Case1: 30 dBm@10MHz carrier Case3: 30, 37 dBm@10MHz carrier airinterface Case1/3 Indoor: with a DL: 20 dBm@10MHz carrier Open to all Relay nodes macro-cell UL: Indoor donor antenna UEs 23 dBm@10MHz carrier (for inOutdoor donor antenna band RN 30 dBm @10MHz carrier. case) Table 2 Deployment of Pico-nodes and user equipment (UE)s Configuration UE density UE Pico Comments distribution distribution 1 Uniform Uniform Uncorrelated Capacity 25/macro cell enhancement 2 Non-uniform Uniform Uncorrelated Sensitivity to [10 100] non-uniform UE /macro cell density 3 Non-uniform Uniform Correlated Cell edge [10 100] enhancement /macro cell 4, 4a, 4b Non-uniform Clusters Correlated Hotspot capacity enhancement

Wireless networks have experienced flying growth in the past twenty years. The trend is expected to continue with the deployment of Mobile Broad-Band (MBB) services. In the coming five to ten years, it is foreseen to have hundreds or even thousands times of the current mobile network capacity. The straightforward way to increase capacity is to apply the new spectrum to telecommunications. However, full application of new spectrum will happen in a long-term, so how to effectively use the allocated spectrum is the most urgent task [1]. Given the limited spectrum resources, cell splitting with heterogeneous network (HetNet) can effectively improve the whole system throughput to multi-times of the traditional homogeneous network (HomoNet). HetNet can be deployed in a cost-effective manner with low power nodes for local cells access. [2]-[5]. In this paper we explore the potential candidates to utilize the assigned frequency resources more efficiently in the HetNet scenarios. Firstly, it introduces the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) official HetNet system modeling and evaluation methodology for Long-Term Evolution (LTE)Advanced system in Section II. In Section III, the advantages and disadvantages of different HetNet frequency allocation approaches are analyzed in detail. Due to limited spectrum resource, the co-channel HetNet deployment is more attractive. Section IV analyzes the issues of the co-channel HetNet deployment and the corresponding solutions, such as range expansion and control channel orthogonality design. Finally a novel HetNet scheme with dynamic spectrum sharing between different layers of macro cell and local cells is proposed in Section V, to mach with the MBB downlink (DL) / uplink (UL)

978-1-4244-7006-8/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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For the convenience of the comparison between HetNet and HomoNet or among different HetNet deployments, the metric of cell group average throughput is introduced to evaluate the system throughput per unit area, and the unit area is defined as the single-macro-cell coverage area in the traditional macrocell-HomoNet. The definition of cell edge user throughput is the same as the traditional macro-cell-HomoNet, i.e. expressing the 5th percentile of the worst user experience in the whole network deployment. III. HETNET FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS

The frequency allocation among macro cells and local cells are crucial to HetNet. The following three approaches are analyzed from the aspects of the capacity and coverage: Co-channel allocation: macro cells as well as local cells share the same entire frequency band. Orthogonal frequency allocation: macro cells are assigned to a part of the whole frequency resource, and local cell would use the remaining part, thus, frequency resource between macro cell and local cell is not overlapped. Overlapped frequency allocation: Frequency resource between marco cells and local cells is overlapped partially. For example, Marco cells are assigned to a part of the whole frequency resource, while the local cells occupy the whole frequency resource, and vice versa. The corresponding examples of the three frequency allocation approaches with 10MHz whole bandwidth are shown in Figure 1.

UEs are macro cell edge UEs, which only have partial bandwidth access. Orthogonal channel allocation has the worst cell group average throughput due to half of the whole bandwidth can be used for both macro cells and local cells network wide, but better cell edge throughput than the frequency overlap case because there is no inter-cell interference between macro cells and local cells. Co-channel frequency allocation is a good balance between the cell group average throughput and cell edge throughput, one reason is that both macro cells and local cells can make full use of the whole bandwidth, another reason is that the cell-edge UEs throughput are guaranteed with the proportional fair scheduler. It should be noted that above is only for data channel capacity evaluation, without taken the control channel coverage and quality into account.

Figure 2. HetNet system capacity gain over HomoNet, comparison among three frequency allocation approaches

B. Control channel coverage analysis The system capacity evaluation in the last sub-Section assumes full buffer traffic without considering the control channel coverage. Local cell deployment, as an efficient measure to offload the hotspot UEs and high traffic from macro cells, would have different load and coverage depending on the frequency planning.

Figure 1. HetNet channel deployments

A. System capacity analysis In this subSection the DL data channel system capacity of the three frequency allocation approaches in Figure 1 are evaluated with HetNet configuration 1, with the full buffer traffic model, 500m inter-site distance, 3GPP Urban channel model Case1 [6], and the proportional fair scheduler. The HetNet system capacity gain over HomoNet for both cell group average throughput and cell edge throughput are shown in Figure 2, where cell selection is based on the traditional RRM measurement of received power and quality of reference signals. It can be seen that: Frequency overlapped allocation (macro cell with 5MHz and pico cell with 10MHz) could reach a best cell group average throughput due to the local-cell-friendly resource allocation, but the cell edge throughput is deteriorated obviously over co-channel case since all the cell edge

Figure 3. SINR distributions of HetNet channel deployments (macro cell Tx power 46dBm)

Figure 3 shows the geometry contours of UEs among the whole area with different local cell transmission powers for both co-channel and orthogonal frequency allocation approaches, by calculating the average received signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) experienced by the reference signals and control channel. Users select macro cell or local cell with the highest received SINR, i.e. based on the

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control channel coverage. Several analysis and conclusion can be achieved that: Control channel coverage of local cell is much larger with orthogonal frequency allocation than with co-channel allocation. With orthogonal frequency allocation, due to no inter-cell interference from macro cells to local cells, and low inter-cell interference among local cells due do low antenna height and sparsely distributed local cell nodes, the local cell coverage is quite robust against the local cell transmission power. However, in co-channel approach, it is quite sensitive to the local cell transmission power, mainly due to the interference from the 9~12dB higher aggressor macro cell transmission power. SINR distribution with orthogonal frequency allocation is significantly higher than that with co-channel allocation, which is also due to no interference from the high-power macro cell to the low-power local cells. It would guarantee the correctness of cell synchronization and control signaling reception. According to above analysis orthogonal channel allocation outperforms the co-channel allocation in terms of the control channel coverage and quality, thus it is expected to have better macro cell traffic offload effect than co-channel allocation, especially for the practical non-full-buffer traffics. IV. HETNET CO-CHANNEL DEPLOYMENT ENHANCEMENT Section III shows that co-channel HetNet deployment has better system capacity with full buffer type of traffic, while its control channel coverage and traffic offload effect are worse than the orthogonal frequency assignment approach. In addition, since the DL transmission power differs a lot betweeen macro cell and local cells, while UL transmission power is the same for a certain UE, the DL and UL coverage and quality would be seriously unbalanced. However, co-channel allocation is still an attractive HetNet deployment due to limited spectrum resources for operators. Accordingly, this Section investigates the potential improvement of the co-channel HetNet deployment, including the range expansion of local cells and the control channel enhancement. A. Range expansion and evaluation Limited by the local cell transmission power and the strong interference from macro cells, the local cell coverage is quite limited, which means that only a small percentage of users can benefit from local cell deployment. To offload the macro cell traffic more, as well as to solve the UL and DL coverage unbalance, range expansion (RE) is introduced for local cells with a positive bias to local cells in the cell selection. Table 3 provides the data channel performance evaluation for HetNet with different RE bias, with full buffer traffic model. It can be seen that a good balance between cell group average throughput and cell edge throughput is reached with 6~9dB RE bias in this scenario, while very large RE bias as 16dB does not provide good cell edge throughput. RE may further jointly designed with inter-cell interference coordination in heterogeneous networks, which can be regarded as one simple

implementation of coordinated multiple-points transmission and reception (CoMP). Thus some high RE biases are not precluded in the future hotspot deployment for the sake of load sharing and UL/DL coverage unbalance solution.
Table 3. HetNet evaluation with different range expansion bias Cell group average Cell edge Range extension Bias (dB) spectral efficiency spectral efficiency (bit/s/Hz/Cell) (bit/s/Hz) 0dB RE bias (no RE) 8.84 0.052 3dB RE bias 8.7 0.063 6dB RE bias 8.51 0.068 9dB RE bias 8.31 0.063 16dB RE bias 8.98 0.015

B. Downlink control channel enhancement For HetNet co-channel deployment with local cell range expansion, the UEs in the expanded area would experience the inter-cell interference that is higher than the serving cell signal. For those UEs, their receiving quality of the synchronization channel and control channels can hardly be guaranteed. Thus it is critical to investigate the DL control channel enhancement for co-channel deployment. The most effective solution to guarantee the DL control channel quality is the orthogonal control channel design between macro cells and local cells, either in frequency domain (FDM) or in time domain (TDM).

Figure 4. Control channel shrinking of Non-CA based FDM solution

Two candidates are proposed for FDM control channel orthogonality design [8~12]: Carrier aggregation (CA) in Rel.10 with cross component carrier (CC) scheduling can be used to avoid the control channel colliding between macro cell and local cells. Each cell layer transmits the control signaling with high power in different CC sets. In other words, control channels locating on multiple CCs have the different coverage due to the different transmission power. CAbased FDM solution does not work for the UEs without CA capability. In addition, CA-based solution can only work for the bandwidth that is the summation of Rel.8 supported bandwidths, which would end to a resource waste for some practical scenarios and narrow bandwidth. Non-CA FDM solutions, referred to as control channel shrinking in Figure 4, is the improvement of the CAbased solution for the low bandwidth HetNet deployment. Shrinking the control channels to only part of the whole bandwidth (e.g. macro cell in frequency range f1, local cell in frequency range f2, both f1 and f2 are Rel.8 backward compatible bandwidths), and the control

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channel region in macro cell and that in local cell are not overlapped in the frequency domain. Legacy Rel.8/9 UEs will only be scheduled in the frequency region same as DL control channel, while Rel.10 UEs can be scheduled on the whole bandwidth. There are multiple candidates proposed for TDM control channel orthogonality design [12~14], including MulticastBroadcast Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) sub-frames, almost blank sub-frames, time shifting, etc. TDM solutions would limit the DL control transmission in partial subframes, with Rel.10 data channel scheduling capability in both PDCCH-subframes as well as non-PDCCH-subframes. However, it is identified that the discontinuous transmission will end to a serious fluctuation of received reference signal quality measurement for cell selection and handover, and thus would cause higher radio link failure of Rel.8/9 UEs. In addition, since the cell-specific reference signals (CRS) are still needed to be transmit to maintain the UEs radio resource management (RRM) measurement, the strong interference from macro cell CRS to local cell control channel cannot be fully avoided, which will end to a fail reception of system information, control signaling and Acknowledgement (ACK) / Non-acknowledgement (NACK) signal for UL transmission, etc. Although the issues in TDM solutions may be solved for Rel.10 UEs, all the above issues will impact the Rel.8/9 UEs backward compatibility. V. HETNET FUTURE EVOLUTION: DYNAMIC SPECTRUM SHARING Section IV illustrated the ongoing 3GPP discussions about co-channel HetNet deployment, which does not show any dominant-promising solution yet. In long-term evolution path, better solutions should be investigated by taking into account both the co-channel motivation of limited spectrum resource and the orthogonal control channel with good traffic offload effect. This Section starts from the DL/UL traffic asymmetry analysis, based on which a dynamic spectrum sharing between the layers of macro cells and local cells are proposed for a cospectrum but orthogonal-frequency-allocated HetNet deployment. A. Traffic asymmetry Along the world, frequency division duplexing (FDD) spectrum is assigned as a pair of symmetric DL and UL band with equal bandwidth, which was according to the traditional UL/DL symmetric voice services. However, according to the statistics in the most 3G networks, most of the data services are DL dominant, such as web-browsing, file downloading and online movie, etc.. Referring to the wireline internet traffic statistics, the DL traffic may be as up to 20 times of the UL traffic. Although the current wireless communication still have the mixed voice and data traffic with similar quantities, an obvious DL to UL traffic asymmetry is already observed. It can be foreseen that with the quick penetration of MBB in the wireless telecommunication system, the system would face to a higher DL to UL asymmetry ratio, especially in the hotspot or indoor areas with quite dense wireless internet UEs. The much heavier DL load together with the symmetric DL/UL spectrum resource allocation brings a phenomenon that the lack of DL resource and the redundant UL resource coexist.

Downlink spectrum efficiency enhancement with air interface optimization (such as multiple antenna enhancement or CoMP) is one way to go. However, the improvement can only be up to tens of percent or less than two times. Deployment of HetNet would bring multiple times of thoughput increase, but co-channel interference is a headach. Assign all spectrums to Time division duplexing (TDD). TDD system was originally designed to fit to the unpaired spectrum allocation as well as the asymmetric DL and UL traffic load. However, in the traditional macro cell network deployment, the network wise frame synchronization is required to avoid the serious DL to UL interference. For those asynchronized TDD systems in neighboring band, a guard band of 5MHz to 10MHz has to be introduced to avoid the neighboring carrier interference. Such a serious requirement makes TDD not as flexible as thought to match the traffic variation in different areas and from time to time, and not fit to deploy the whole spectrum assignment. Re-assign FDD spectrum with the asymmetric DL/UL bandwidth. However, traffic load statistic varies in different regions; differs from large scale to hotspots even in the same region; and varies from time to time according to the new service deployment or even varies quickly due to population changes e.g. in a big event. Since FDD spectrum is assigned quite stable, which can be fixed within a decades or more, it would be pretty hard to find a proper ratio of DL to UL bandwidth for FDD even in one region. In addition, different FDD DL/UL spectrum assignment would end to various types of terminals and base station RF designs, which will punish the large-scale product cost benefit. Utilizing the spared UL spectrum resources in the existing system with the hotspot local cell low power transmission. To avoid the inter-cell interference and adapt to the traffic variation, dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) between the two layers of macro cells and local cells are to be introduced. Among the above four schemes, both the first one (traditional solution) and the fourth one (hotspot transmission in spared UL band) sounds applicable, i.e. without unsolvable regulation issues. For the fourth one, the necessary DSS mechanism among macro cells and local cells are introduced in the next sub-Section. B. Dynamic spectrum sharing in Het et The principle of DSS is to transmit DL traffic on the spare UL resources either in the UL slot in TDD or in FDD UL band. The DSS mechanism in FDD system is described in detail in this subSection, which can be extended to TDD system straightforwardly. Considering that serious DL heavy traffic mainly happens in hotspot areas, such UL resource utilization for DL transmission should be mainly deployed for local cells, while

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keeping the macro cell as the traditional DL/UL resource usage, as shown in Figure 5. The interference coexistence is the main issue to be solved in the HetNet DSS system, which including two types: Interference in the same carrier: The interference from local cell transmission to macro cell UL reception, or vice versa. It is proposed to solve it via TDM as in Figure 6, i.e. schedule macro cell UL data transmission in few UL slots, while reserving the other UL slots mainly for the hotspot local cell DL transmission. The configuration is mainly based on the traffic estimation and sensor, which also requires the dynamic coordination between the macro cell and the associated low power nodes in the same area, which can also deemed as a special CoMP scheme. Interference between neighbor carriers: The interference from local cell transmission to macro cell in neighboring frequency carrier. TDM coordination may not be applicable if neighboring frequency is assigned to a different operator. In that case, the local cell transmission power in the UL resources should be limited to a low level that is similar as a terminal. Therefore, seen from macro base station, the interference from a neighboring carrier local cell is just as a traditional terminal transmission in neighboring carriers, which should be managed easily in the traditional inter-frequency coexistence design.

considerable (even with 24dBm or lower power) to offload macro cell heavy DL traffic, and is quite robust against the transmission power of local cells. In addition, the high SINR distribution will end to a remarkable DL transmission spectrum efficiency in those spared UL resources. It should be noted that such an orthogonal frequency allocation does not split any macro cell DL spectrum resource, which can be treated as almost free resources when the UL load is low. It is also possible for the local cell to work on both the FDD DL band and FDD UL band, but it worth to mention that the local cell coverage in FDD DL band would be much smaller than that in FDD UL band. VI. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we provided a comprehensive introduction on the efficient HetNet deployments. Different frequency allocation approaches are analyzed on the aspects of the data channel capacity and the control channel coverage. Though better capacity in the co-channel allocation is observed, the orthogonal one outperforms the co-channel allocation obviously in the control channel coverage. Due to the better usage of the limited spectrum, this paper discusses the issues and potential enhancement of the co-channel HetNet deployment in detail. The long-term evaluation of co-spectrum HetNet deployment with dynamic spectrum sharing among macro cell and local cells is proposed to adapt to the DL/UL asymmetric traffic loads and its variation, which would become a promising and efficient HetNet deployment for both FDD and TDD systems. REFERENCES
[1] [2] Winner+ , D1.2: Initial Report on System Aspects of Flexible Spectrum Use, http://projects.celtic-initiative.org/winner+/ A. Khandekar, N. Bhushan, T. Ji, and V. Vanghi, "LTE-Advanced: Heterogeneous networks," in Wireless Conference (EW), 2010 European, pp. 978-982. J. Akhtman and L. Hanzo, "Heterogeneous Networking: An Enabling Paradigm for Ubiquitous Wireless Communications [Point of View]," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 98, pp. 135-138. R. Ferrus, O. Sallent, and R. Agusti, "Interworking in heterogeneous wireless networks: Comprehensive framework and future trends," Wireless Communications, IEEE, vol. 17, pp. 22-31. 3GPP RP-090665. Revised SID on LTE-Advanced, Qualcomm, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia, Orange, Alcatel Lucent, Softbank Mobile, KDDI, Samsung, Panasonic, Huawei. 3GPP TR 36.814 V.9.0.0 R1-103458, Analysis on the eICIC schemes for the control channels in HetNet, Huawei. R1-103126, Enhanced ICIC for control channels to support HetNet, Huawei. R1-101924, macro+HeNB performance with escape carrier or dynamic carrier selection, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia 3GPP R1-102670, Identification of Co-channel Problems with HetNet Deployments, CATT. R1-100491, Comparison of Carrier Segment and Expansion Carrier for Contiguous Carrier Aggregation, NTT DOCOMO. R1-102831, Rel-8/9 compatible PDCCH interference mitigation schemes for HetNets, Texas Instruments. 3GPP R1-102678, Interference Management for Control Channels in Outdoor Hotzone Scenario, Kyocera. 3GPP R1-102618, Considerations on non-CA based heterogeneous deployments, Ericsson, ST-Ericsson.

[3] Figure 5. DSS deployment in FDD system

[4]

[5]

Figure 6. DSS usage in FDD system

[6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

Recalling the capacity and control channel coverage analysis in Section III, Figure 5 shows the coverage of macro cell and local cells in spared macro UL resource transmission, where the ellipse in pink means the coverage of the macro cell which works in FDD mode with some muted UL sub-frames as shown in Figure 6 left, and the ellipse in green means the coverage of the local cell whose DL sub-frames at FDD UL spectrum corresponding to the muted UL sub-frame in macro cell in Figure 6 left. Since the local cell DL transmission is in macro cell UL band, there is no DL strong inter-cell interference from macro cells, thus the SINR geometry distribution can refer to the orthogonal frequency allocation approach in Figure 3, i.e. control channel coverage is quite

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