THROUGHPUT TROUBLESHOOTING

(DUS/DUL Baseband UNITs)

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Key Points to NOTE before we start… I
OSS based throughput Performance

 Throughput performance is very dynamic and depends on variety of factors and has a
huge dependency on user behavior.
 As we know, we have high traffic from social-network applications which are bursty in
nature and generally very small in size.
 At the same time, we have to cater to apps with high data requirement or high
background data requirement in general.
 Therefore it is necessary to asses what kind of users dominate in a
city/cluster/eNodeB or even a cell, depending on the network element we are trying
to troubleshoot.
 Next comes the radio conditions in either direction and then the capacity crunch that
can vary from node to node.

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Key Points to NOTE before we start… II
DT based throughput Performance

 DT based throughput troubleshooting is little more obvious and easier compared to OSS
based troubleshooting. This is because the big factor of user behavior is ruled and the
DT UE is generally performing heavy downloads or uploads.
 Also, the radio conditions are easier to study at-least for downlink and partially for
uplink.
 One of the bigger challenges with DT based throughput acceptance is achieving peak
throughput and again variety of factors can influence the performance.
 So, the primitive checks should be that the UE and FTP servers are functioning normally.
 The detailed techniques will be discussed in forthcoming slides.

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Challenges observed in throughput troubleshooting

 The biggest difference between troubleshooting say accessibility, retainability or

mobility is in each of their cases L3 traces are sufficient to find the root cause.
However during troubleshooting throughput, L3 traces offer little assistance.
 Therefore, we need to depend on L2 traces to understand the root cause and find out
how exactly we can optimize the performance.
 These L2 traces are also called as Baseband traces.
 Also, counters are not very helpful as they average out the performance over a Rop and
unless something drastic is observed, we cannot draw distinct conclusions.
Nevertheless they help us understand in what direction to look and the pointers that
can be ruled while performing the troubleshooting.

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FEW Mandatory checks before starting with troubleshooting
Configuration Name Expected Value Reasons for deviation Status Check
dlChannelBandwidth bandwidth*1000 PASS
if 0, check if it is downlink
ulChannelBandwidth bandwidth*1000 PASS
only cell
pdcchCfiMode 4 or 5 Intentional by Design PASS
noOfUsedTxAntennas 2 for MIMO, 1 for SIMO PASS
check if intentional like is it
partOfRadioPower 100 PASS
Small Cell
pZeroNominalPucch "-114 to -118" Intentional by Design PASS
pZeroNominalPusch "-100 to -106" Intentional by Design PASS
confOutputPower According to design PASS
noOfPucchSrUsers According to bandwidth, should be equal PASS
Intentional by Design
noOfPucchCqiUsers or greater than rrc-connected users PASS
ulConfigurableFrequencyStart 0 Intentional by Design PASS
dlConfigurableFrequencyStart 0 Intentional by Design PASS
ulFrequencyAllocationProportion 100 Intentional by Design PASS
dlFrequencyAllocationProportion 100 Intentional by Design PASS
At-least 2 or 3 times the theoretical
licenseCapacityDlBbCapacity PASS
throughput for bandwidth
At-least 2 or 3 times the theoretical
licenseCapacityUlBbCapacity PASS
throughput for bandwidth
licenseStateDualAntDlPerfPkg 1 if MIMO PASS
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 UPLINK THROUGHPUT

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 POOR UPLINK THROUGHPUT

Buffer Status Uplink

Power Headroom
Report Interference

Link Adaption &

PDCCH Congestion BLER/HARQ
MCS Allocated

Transport/Hardware
SE/TTI
Issues

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 Understanding how is the data requirement is little easy in uplink as compared to
Downlink, as for uplink scheduling we get an input for scheduling requirements using the
“Buffer Status Report”.
So an audit of Buffer Status report using Baseband Traces can be carried out to perform
the troubleshooting.
mtd peek -ta ulMacPeBl -si LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_MAC_CTRL_INFO_IND -dir INCOMING

If the buffer size throughout the traces is found to be low, then that means the requirement itself is low
and we cannot get higher values of throughput. If higher value of BSRs are observed then go to next step.
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 Power headroom indicates how much transmission power left for a UE to use in addition to the power being
used by current transmission. If the values are negative or close to Zero, indicates not much power is
available with the UEs and bigger TBS allocations are not possible, as higher power would be required for
that.

Power Headroom = UE Max Transmission Power - PUSCH Power = Pmax - P_pusch

mtd peek -ta ulMacPeBl -si LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_MAC_CTRL_INFO_IND -dir INCOMING

Value of PHR=2,
means it is
already critical
and will limit
maximum thpt

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 The live interference levels can be assessed by using the below command and we can get prb wise
interference value using this inbuilt OOS script.

run $scripts/lteUlInt.mos 10

If historic values need to be checked

then, we can look at the individual PRB
counters:

pmRadioRecInterferencePwrPUCCH &
pmRadioRecInterferencePwr

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SINR plays an important role in the allocation of the Uplink throughput in terms of
modulation and transport block size. Good values are in the range of >12/13.
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEASRPRT2_UL_IND

If the SINR is observed to be low, look at the

interference levels during the allocations and see how
were the interference levels on the allocated PRBS
and compare them to pZeroNominal-PUSCH values.
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As we know high NACKs can lead to increase in retransmission and adversely impact the
throughput and utilization of resources.
High NACKs are again an indication towards PHR, SINR & interference conditions.

mtd peek -ta ulMacPeBl -si LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_MAC_CTRL_INFO_IND -dir INCOMING

ACK NACK
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 Downlink THROUGHPUT

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 POOR DOWNLINK THROUGHPUT

Rank
CQI Report TBS Size
Indicator/MIMO

Link Adaption &

PDCCH Congestion SE/TTI
MCS Allocated

Transport/Hardware
Issues

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 The easiest way to troubleshoot Downlink throughput issues is using BBFilter option in
logtool. The commands to be used for providing the input to the Logtool module are:
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEASRPRT2_DL_IND
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEASRPRT2_UL_IND
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEAS2_DL_IND
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_HARQFDBK2_DL_IND
lhsh gcpu01024 te e trace4 UpcDlMacCeFt_DL_SCHEDULER
mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEAS2_DL_IND

Bbfilter option in Logtool

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Various excel techniques can be
used to understand the data and
do analytics about the behavior
of traffic and scheduler that can
impact the downlink
throughput.

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 Similar to Uplink throughput, if the data requirement itself is low then the throughput achieved
using OSS counters also will be low.
 So we can check the requirement using the data available for scheduler for scheduling and this
information is not available in BBFilter but the parsed of commands using LTNG-Decoder will have
those values.
 Stitch the call using BBUEREF and find out the assignable-bits available for the TBS assigned

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 MIMO Usage can be assessed from the BBFilter output and to check whether rank-2 was allocated
or not LTNG-Decoder output can be referred to as well. If both TBS1 and TBS2 have bits then
RANK=2 is being used.

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Type of Modulation use and the MCS used according to the TBS allocated. If the modulation scheme
allocated is lower than expected based on the CQI, then check for capacity crunch issues.

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BLER Ratio dictates the Retransmissions in a cell and as we know higher the BLER ratio, higher number
of resources are wasted just in retransmissions.

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If any of the below counters have high values, then the problem maybe at the transport and at the
VLAN Switch. So a troubleshooting with transport team should be carried out in that case.

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Trace Trace
group Required Traces group Required Traces
mtd peek -ta dlMacCeBl -signal LPP_UP_DLMACPE_CI_DL_UE_ALLOC_IND -filter
T1 T9 lhsh gcpu00256 te e trace1 UpUlMacPeBl_Smac
{(U16SIG)8,NEQ,(U16)0x00}
T2 mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEAS2_DL_IND T10 lhsh gcpu01024 te e trace5 UpcUlMacCeFt_UL_LINKADAPTATION
T3 mtd peek -ta ulMacCeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_MAC_CTRL_INFO_IND T11 lhsh gcpu01024 te e trace4 UpcUlMacCeFt_UL_VALIDATION
T4 lhsh gcpu01024 te e trace4 UpcDlMacCeFt_DL_SCHEDULER T12 lhsh gcpu00256 te e bus_send UpUlCellPeBlMaster_Ici
mtd peek -ta dlMacCeBl -signal LPP_UP_DLMACPE_CI_DL_UE_CANDIDATES_IND -filter
T5 lhsh gcpu01024 te e trace4 UpcDlMacCeFt_DL_VALIDATION T13
{(U16SIG)6,NEQ,(U16)0x00}
mtd peek -ta ulMacCeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_UE_ALLOC_IND -filter
T6 T14 lhsh gcpu00768 te e all UpDlRlcPeFt_DRB_PDU; lhsh gcpu00256 te e all UpUlRlcPeFt_DRB_PDU
{(U16SIG)7,NEQ,(U16)0x00}
T7 mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_UL_L1_MEAS2_UL_IND T15 mtd peek -ta dlMacCeBl -signal LPP_UP_ULMACPE_CI_DL_HARQ_ALLOC_IND
Throughout
T8 lhshTroubleshooting
gcpu01024 te| e
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trace2 UpcUlMacCeFt_UL_SCHEDULER T16 mtd peek -ta ulL1PeBl -si LPP_UP_ULL1PE_EI_ALLOCATION_IND
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