896

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2009

Beacon Signaling and its Application to Inter-Frequency Handoff in

OFDMA Cellular Communications
Michael Mao Wang, Member, IEEE, Tom Richardson, Ravi Palanki, and Alex Gorokhov

AbstractThis paper introduces a beacon coding and signaling technique and its application to handoff in OFDMA
cellular communication networks. Beacon signaling provides an
efficient alternative to the conventional tune-away approach for
inter-carrier/frequency handoff. The proposed handoff technique
transmits beacon pilots in other carrier frequencies in the network allowing for easy and early detection of neighboring cells,
and fast and seamless handoffs in a multi-carrier synchronous
or asynchronous deployment. The proposed technique thereby
minimizes the call drop rate and interference due to delayed
handoff.
Index TermsBeacon, inter-carrier handoff, OFDMA.

I. I NTRODUCTION

N multi-carrier deployments of a cellular communication

system, wherein more than one carrier frequency can be
used, an access terminal is typically tuned to one carrier.
The access terminal may not know the presence of sectors
operating on other carriers. Traditionally, this problem was
solved by the access terminal tuning-away to other carriers
to search for other sectors on those carriers. This approach,
however, causes an interruption in data service to that access
terminal and causes delay in handoff. In this paper, we
introduce a beacon signal based inter-carrier handoff technique
for use in OFDM-based communication networks. OFDM
has become a mainstream modulation technique for next
generation wireless communications. For example, the most
recent proposed next generation wireless wide area network
(WWAN) standards, 3GPP2 Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB)
[1], IEEE802.20 Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA)
[2], 3GPP LTE [3], and WiMAX [4] are all OFDMA-based.
Mobility management is crucial to the performance of an
OFDM-based system since a delayed serving cell switch
introduces interference and increases call-drop rate.
II. B EACON S IGNALING
Conventional inter-carrier/frequency handoff uses tuneaway to other carriers to search for other cells on those carriers. This approach suffers from the drawback of interruption
in data service since a typical access terminal is equipped
with only one tuner. As a result, tuning-away can not be done
very often thereby resulting in late detection of neighboring
cells and delayed handoff. In this paper, a different solution to
this problem is proposed. This solution is based on having a
sector transmit a periodic sequence of beacons on other carrier
Manuscript received May 11, 2009. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was H. Wymeersch.
The authors are with the Corporate Research Center, Qualcomm Inc., San
Diego, California USA 92121 (e-mail: wangm@qualcomm.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2009.12.091048

Fig. 1.

Illustration of beacon transmission scheme for inter-carrier handoff.

frequencies (cf. Fig. 1). The beacons contain information about

the sector identifier and the sector carrier frequency. A terminal operating on a given carrier frequency can see beacons
on the same carrier frequency transmitted by other sectors
operating on other carrier frequencies. Thus the terminal is
able to identify these other sectors without the need to tune
away.
In an OFDM system, beacon signaling is done by transmitting a large fraction of the energy in an OFDM symbol in
one subcarrier. The choice of the subcarrier depends on the
message. However, beacon detection can be prone to errors (an
event in which a beacon is detected on a subcarrier where no
beacon was sent by other sectors due to noise or interference)
and erasure (an event in which a beacon is sent but not detected
due to fading). The message , represented by information
symbols, u = (1 , 2 , , ), is therefore encoded into
a Reed-Solomon codeword as c = (1 , 2, , ), where
0 1 is the code symbol whose value corresponds
to the subcarrier index on which a beacon tone is transmitted,
is the number of tones that can be used for beacon signaling
in each of the OFDM symbols. On each of these OFDM
symbols (1 ), a beacon tone is transmitted in one
of the subcarriers (no transmissions on other subcarriers).
Since Reed-Solomon codes are maximum-distance separable,
it ensures that erasures or half that number of errors
can be corrected. However, the beacon code often needs to
be detected in the presence of timing uncertainty. Note that
the sector transmits an infinite periodic sequence of beacons
, 1 , 2 , , , 1 , 2 , , , . An access terminal
may not have information a priori about the boundary of the
code word. Thus, the beacon code should be such that all the
cyclic shifts of a code word should be decodable to the same
message. We therefore represent the message as

=0

( 1)

= 1 ( 1)1 + + 1 ( 1) + 0 (1)

c 2009 IEEE
1089-7798/09$25.00

WANG et al.: BEACON SIGNALING AND ITS APPLICATION TO INTER-FREQUENCY HANDOFF IN OFDMA CELLULAR COMMUNICATIONS

897

/
where = ( 1) mod ( 1). We then define
the information symbols by
u = (1 , 2 , , ) = (1 , , 1 , 0 )

(2)

where is a primitive element in GF( ). We now ReedSolomon [6] encode the information symbols u into a codeword c = (1 , 2 , , ) via the Galois Fourier Transform
(GFT)
=

=1

+1 +( 1)/

(3)

=1

where = 1, 2, , and
denotes summation
modulo . Once the terminal detects code symbols , +1 , , +1 at OFDM symbols, i.e.,
, +1 , , +1 , we have the following linear system as
shown in (4) at the top of the next page. This system does not
have a unique solution if is unknown. But we first solve the
1
linear system (in GF( )) for 1 + = 1 , i.e.,
1 + ( 1)/ = log 1
(5)

We
) that = log 1 ( 1)/ and 1 =
( observe
log mod (( 1)/ ) if we can assure that
< ( 1)/ .

(6)

The value of can then be used in solving for , =

2, , 1, 0. Therefore, the message can be determined
in the absence of a priori timing information . In addition,
the value of provides frame timing information of the advertising sector. Hence, the beacon also helps handoff between
asynchronous cells since beacon signals provides the frame
boundary information of the cell from which the beacon is
sent. According to the size of , we can choose and
such that (6) is satisfied. The choice of is restricted by
the total available subcarriers and is restricted by decoding
delay since a minimum of OFDM symbols is needed for
decoding the beacon code.
III. B EACON C ODE D ESIGN AND D ETECTION
A. Beacon Code Design
In this section, is assumed a 12-bit message that contains
the minimum amount of information needed for a sector
switch, including 9 bits sector identification number (e.g., PN
offset), 1 bit synchronous/asynchronous mode indication, and
2 bits of carrier (channel band) identification. It is represented
by = 2 information symbols and is encoded into a
codeword of = 10 over a set of = 211 subcarriers. The
primitive element is chosen to /be 207. Since < 212 ,
it is always true that 1 < 212 (211 1) < 15. Hence
1 < ( 1)/ = 21 and thus this beacon code is
cyclic shift decodable. Note that the beacon tone may cause
interference to the data transmission on that carrier. However,
the beacon tone is only one out of = 211 tones and therefore
the disturbance is minimal.
The 12-bit message is first represented by (1) with
= 2, and 1 = / ( 1) and 0 = mod ( 1).
Next, we define the information symbols 1 = 1 and
2 = 0 . We now apply the GFT to generate the codeword

Fig. 2. Illustration of the transmission of a beacon code ( = 10, = 211)

where the code symbol 0 210, = 1, 2, , is defined as the
subcarrier index of a set of = 211 subcarriers. The hollow tones denote
no energy transmitted on these tones.

1 , 2 , , , 10 , where = 1 +21 + 0 +42 , =

1, 2, , 10 according to (3). The codeword is then transmitted on = 10 OFDM symbols periodically. That is, for
each code symbol , a beacon tone is transmitted on the
subcarrier of the 211 subcarriers of OFDM symbol ,
= 1, 2, , , as illustrated in Fig.2.
The starting position in the transmission frame structure
of the = 10 OFDM symbols used to transmit a beacon
code word c = (1 , 2, , 10 ) is a hash function of the
sector identification number as is the actual location of the
subcarriers within each OFDM symbol of the total bandwidth
FFT used for transmission of a beacon code symbol . The
separation between two consecutive beacon OFDM symbols

= +1 is by design far apart (e.g., = 500 OFDM

symbols) to ensure minimal disturbance to the data traffic.
B. Beacon Detection
At the receiver, a beacon tone is declared to be detected
if the subcarriers energy crosses a given threashold. Since
= 2, we need at least two symbols at the terminal to decode
the message . Let us assume that a terminal receives two
error-free symbols and +1 at time and +1
= 1 +21 + 0 +42
+1 = 1 +21(+1) + 0 +42(+1)
where = 207. Writing the above in matrix form gives
[ ] [
] [ +21 ]

1
1
1
=
.

21
42
+1

0 +42

42

This system can be solved to obtain 1 +21 = +1

21 42 (in
(

42 )

GF(211)). We then obtain 1 = log +1

mod 21
21 42

42 /
+1
21 . The value of can be used to
and = log 21 42
solve for 0 . With 1 and 0 , the message can therefore
be determined according to (1).
In the presence of errors, verification of the decoded mes is re-encoded
sage is necessary. The decoded message
and the resulting sequence, + , ++1 , , + , is
compared to the beacon tones + , ++1 , , +

898

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 13, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2009

+1
..
.
+1

( 1)

..
.

(1)( 1)

2( 1)

..
.

2(1)( 1)

..
.

( 1)

..
.

(1)( 1)

( 1)

1 +
2( 1)
2 +
..
.
0 +

( 1)

(4)

IV. C ONCLUSION

Fig. 3. Simulated beacon message detection performance (channel model:

ITU Pedestrian A and B [8], false alarm probability =106 , i.e., the
probability of decoding beacon signals to a wrong (but valid) message is
106 . OFDM subcarrier spacing is 9.6kHz. OFDM symbol time offset among
cells is uniformly distributed between 0 to 50% of the symbol duration. The
frequency accuracy of a sector is 0.1ppm at a carrier frequency of 2GHz (10
MHz bandwidth).

at the OFDM symbols of + , +(+1) , + where

> . A decoded message can be considered to be valid
only if the received beacon sequence matches the re-encoded
message on a certain number ( ) of OFDM symbols.
With the detected sector identification number and the
beacon symbol position, the timing information (i.e., the
OFDM symbol index in a transmission frame structure) of the
advertising sector can also be determined. Hence, the beacon
also helps handoff between asynchronous cells since beacon
signals provides the timing information of the cell from which
the beacon is sent.
Fig. 3 shows the probability of successful detection of the
message from the example given above with = 4. As
we can see, this beacon code can be detected at very low
cell geometries (signal to interference ratios (SIRs)). At low
SIR, the Pedestrian B channel has lower detection probability
than the Pedestrian A channel since Pedestrian A has much
less channel delay spread resulting in less frequency diversity
and more channel variance for the beacon tone. Therefore the
detection probability is higher at low SIR for Pedestrian A.
Note that these results do not take into account the low peakto-average power ratio (PAPR) of the beacon symbols (single
tones). Such a power boost would in fact allow the beacon
codeword to be detected at even lower geometry, i.e., higher
penetration to other sectors.

Like all other wireless systems, cellular OFDMA systems require the transmission of several control channels.
These control channels typically are used to transmit a small
message. An effective scheme of transmitting such small
messages is to use beacon signaling. The proposed beacon
signaling transmits pilots in other carrier frequencies allowing
for fast and seamless handoff in a multi-carrier synchronous
or asynchronous deployment, enabling early discovery of
neighbor sectors, thereby minimizing the call drop rate and
the interference due to delayed handoff. Beacon signaling as
described in this paper offers several advantages compared
to other forms of signaling. For example, beacons can be
detected with fairly low receiver complexity by just looking for
subcarriers with significantly higher energy. This is in contrast
to traditional coherently coded schemes which would require
channel estimation. In addition, beacons can be detected at
very low SIR due to the high amount of energy placed on
the beacon subcarrier. When the beacon from a sector is too
weak to be detectable, the terminal is usually far away from
that sector. Theres no urgency to detect that sector since
handoff to that sector is not yet imminent. Another advantage
is that beacon OFDM symbols where all the energy is on
one subcarrier have low PAPR. This allows for higher power
amplifier efficiency on these symbols, thereby allowing deeper
coverage for beacon signaling. Finally, we note that OFDM
symbol time synchronization among cells helps but is not
necessary in the proposed beacon signaling scheme. That is,
beacon signaling can be applied to asynchronous systems as
well since even in the worst case where OFDM symbol timing
between two base stations are offset by 50%, the receiver will
still pick up 50% of the beacon tone energy together with
some inter-symbol interference and inter-carrier interference.
This will result in 3dB degradation with respect to perfect
symbol synchronization.
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[1] 3GPP2 C.S0084-001 v2.0, Ultra mobile broadband air interface specification, Sep. 2007.
[2] IEEE Standard for local and metropolitan area networks part 20: air
interface for mobile broadband wireless access aystems supporting
vehicular mobility, Aug. 2008.
[3] 3GPP TS36.201, LTE physical layergeneral description, Aug. 2007.
[4] IEEE P802.16e/D12, Air interface for fixed and mobile broadband
wireless access systems, Oct. 2006.
[5] H Bolcskei, MIMO-OFDM wireless systems: basics, perspectives, and
challenges, IEEE Wireless Commun., vol. 12, pp. 31-37, Aug. 2006.
[6] R. Blahut, Algebraic Codes for Data Transmission. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[7] ITU-R Recommendation M.1225, Guidelines for evaluation of radio
transmission technologies for IMT-2000, 1997.