Mobility Robustness in 5G

Networks
Author: Ashish Thapliyal
Supervisor: Prof. Olav Tirkkonen
Advisor: M.Sc Tommi Jokela
Presentation: 10-Oct-2016
This thesis work is conducted at Nokia Oy. Espoo
 Outline

• Motivation and Background.

• Mobility Robustness Problems in current cellular Networks.
• Mobility Robustness Enhancements.
• Conclusion.
Motivation and Background
 Usage of mobile technology has grown rapidly in recent years.
 Cisco estimates that:
 Last decade, mobile data traffic grew 4000 times.
 In last 15 years it grew by 400 million times.
 The data traffic is going to see a tenfold increase from 2015 to 2019
Continue...
 A whole new set of devices are emerging on the horizon for mobile networks.
 Unlike previous mobile generations, 5G will be driven by network densification rather than
higher system capacity and spectral efficiency.
 With Network densification, the handover will become more frequent and the time taken will
also reduce.
 The main topics for this thesis are:
 Mobility State Estimation Enhancements.
 Radio Link Failure Enhancements.
 Mobility State Estimation

 A method in which number of handover/cell

reselection events define the UE’s mobility
state.
 Three mobility states:
 Normal Mobility State
 Medium Mobility State
 Fast Mobility State
 High or medium mobility state, mobility
parameters can be scaled, resulting in faster
UE’s handover procedure.
Dual Connectivity
 In 3GPP release 12, a new network architecture with split Control and User plane was introduced
called Dual Connectivity.
 Control Plane and User Plane are not necessarily handled by same network node.
 Small cells can be used to increase the capacity of users at hot-spots.
 Macro cells are used to enhance the coverage.
Re-establishment of RRC Connection
 RRC Connection Re-establishment procedure is performed because of radio connection failures.

 Procedure is used to re-configure SRB1 and re-activate security.

 RRC Connection Reconfiguration procedure is then used to setup SRB2 and DRBs and hence,
bring the UE back to the same state where it lost the RRC connection.

 RRC Connection Re-establishment procedure consists:

 RRC connection re-establishment request
 RRC connection re-establishment
 RRC connection re-establishment complete

 RRC Connection Reconfiguration procedure consists:

 RRC connection reconfiguration
 RRC connection reconfiguration complete
RRC Connection Suspend Resume Procedure
in 5G

 Used for state transition from RRC_CONNECTED_INACTIVE to RRC_CONNECTED state and

vice versa.

 RRC Connection Suspend procedure is initiated by E-UTRAN.

 The resumption procedure is initiated by UE through.

 The RRC Connection Resume procedure contains:

 RRC connection resume request
 RRC connection resume
 RRC connection resume complete
Handover Region

 This figure depicts the concept of handover region:

 Handover region of different pairing of cells:

Source-Target Handover Region (m) ISD (m)

Macro-Macro 22 500

Pico-Pico 5.6 125

UE speed and Handover regions

 Time to cover the Handover region with different UE speeds.

Source-Target 3 km/h 30 km/h 40 km/h 60 km/h 120 km/h

Macro- Macro 26 s 2.6 s 1.9 s 1.3 s 0.7 s
Pico- Pico 6.7 s 0.7 s 0.5 s 0.3 s 0.2 s

 Take aways:
 Handover should be triggered earlier for faster UEs because faster UEs stay in handover
region for a considerably shorter time than slow moving UEs.

 Handover should be triggered earlier for Pico-Pico, scenario compared to Macro-Macro

scenario as the handover region for former is very small compared to latter.
Dual Connectivity and MSE
 One problem in MSE is the possibility to use only one MSE instance.
 In the figure, UE is in normal mobility state for macro cell but in fast/medium mobility state
for small cell.
 If MSE is calculated by checking macro cell changes:
 Time taken to complete handover = Time to trigger + handover execution time
= 480 ms + 150ms = 630 ms.
 From previous table, in SeNB with a UE speed of :
 30 km/h, the handover region is covered in 672 ms.
 40 km/h, the handover region is covered in 504 ms.
 Hence, UEs with speed more than 30 km/h, DC will get RLF for SeNB change.
 Optimization needs for re-establishment of
radio connection
 Strict latency requirements in 5G.
 Initial access to the network should be instant and recovery from RLF should be fast.
 Drive test result carried by Qualcomm shows:
 HOF rate in downtown – 22%
 RRC Connection Re-establishment failure rate - 60%
 Need for a mechanism to bring down the failure rate of re-establishment procedure.

Interruption Time (ms) User Experience

Successful HO and data 80-100 No user perceivable

forwarding
Successful HO and no data
forwarding
RLF and successful re-
establishment
RLF followed by unsuccessful re-
establishment and NAS Recovery
interruption.
200-250 User hears "click".
8000-3000 User hears cutting of some
words above 1 second.
3000-5000 Unbearable silence for user, it may
lead to hanging up of the call.
Optimization needs for re-establishment of radio
connection

 To bring the UE back to state of lost RRC connection, the current LTE signalling needs five
RRC messages to be exchanged between UE and the network.

 The UE context fetching when the TeNb is not prepared was added to LTE after Release
12.

 If the last serving eNB does not prepare TeNB for handover and if the context fetching fails
then the RRC Connection Re-establishment procedure is considered as a failure. UE goes
to RRC_IDLE state and then tries to establish a RRC Connection, which takes around 3-5
seconds.

 Most of the delay comes from various timer expiry, but in 5G as we can ensure that UE
context are always available, these timers can be set more aggressively.
Mobility Robustness Enhancements
 A need to maintain two mobility states for a 5G dual-connectivity UE to scale the mobility
parameters of macro cells and small cells differently.

 Each radio layer of a multi-connectivity session can be mapped to its own MSE process to
allow mobility state differentiation based on properties such as cell size, cell density or link
reliability.

 With the new method:

 In MeNB, UE is slow moving, no need to scale the mobility parameters.
 In SeNB, UE is in medium mobility, so TTT value is scaled by sf_medium (0.5), so
TTT becomes 480 × 0.5 = 240 ms.

 Time taken by UE with speed of 60 km/h to cross the handover region of small cell (5.6 m)
was 336 ms. This scaling provides enough time to perform HO, hence guarding SeNB
against RLF.
Re-establishing a RRC Connection using RRC
Connection Resume Procedure
 By implementing some modifications to RRC Connection Resume procedure proposed for 5G
and NB-IoT, this procedure can be used to re-establish a RRC connection in 5G.

 RRC Connection Resume is a smaller procedure than currently used procedure for re-
establishing a RRC connection in LTE, hence it is faster and less bits are transferred over air.

 As we re-use the same RRC message sequence that is used for RRC Connection Resume
procedure for re-establishing the RRC connection, number of RRC messages will be reduced,
easing implementation and maintenance efforts.
Comparison of legacy RRC Connection Re-
establishment with RRC Connection Resume
procedure of NB-IoT

KPI analysis of re- Using RRC Connection Using RRC Suspend Advantages
establishment of RRC Re-establishment of Resume Procedure in
connection in LTE and LTE 5G
5G
Signalling Overhead 5 RRC message 3 RRC messages 40% reduction in RRC
to establish all to establish all SRBS signalling (3 vs 5
SRBs and DRBs. and DRBs messages) in 5G.

Control Plane Latency Random Access Random Access Reduced by 1 RTT.

delay + 2.5 * RTT delay + 1.5* RTT
Conclusion and Future study
 Enhanced MSE will improve the mobility of a dual connectivity or multi connectivity UE in a 5G
networks.

 The mobility state estimation of each radio leg is a better representative of actual mobility of the
UE with respect to each dual connected radio leg.

 Use of RRC Resume procedure for re-establishment of RRC connection will reduce the signaling
for re-establishing RRC connection, reduce latency and also obviate the need for a separate
signaling for RRC Connection Re-establishment procedure.

 Most important future work for dual MSE is to perform simulations and compare the results
against a dual connected UE with a single mobility state.

 Same goes for using the RRC Resume procedure to re-establish the RRC connection, the next
step would be to simulate the re-establishment scenario using the RRC Resume procedure and
compare its latency against the latency in legacy re-establishment scenario
Thanks !!