Ping Pong Handover

As the cellular network growing, it requires addition of new sites to expand capacity and or
coverage services. New mobile operators were expecting to grow their network in exponential
order to gain market share against mature competitors. Without any intensive network
performance maintenance, common problem such ping pong handover would be degrade user
experience like bad voice quality (SQI speech quality index, MOS mean opinion score) or even
dropped call.

Ping Pong handover is shown from the successful handover

back to old cell within pre-defined time of total handover, e.g. less than 10 seconds. Since not all
BSS vendors provide such performance counters it might be identified by simple metric that
shall be expressed as total successful handover over number of call or connection, e.g. more than
200% indicates ping pong handover.

The actual ping pong handover is easily identified through drive test with sense of optimization
engineer without require any calculation. Coverage holes might lead to Ping-Pong handover
especially for slow moving mobiles. It may be cause by shadowing by high building. Several
possible equal signals from two or more base stations might lead to Ping-Pong handover as well
which is so called not optimized cell dominance.

The following action items shall be used for optimization solutions:

 Check the parameter setting such as hysteresis, offset, priority layer in dual-band case,
etc. If poor parameters setting found, then correct the related parameters. Compare to
default parameters design.
 Check the output power BSPWR and BSPWRT which normally put on maximum value
or compare to design.
 Check path balance on transceiver link, e.g. loss in uplink and downlink chain. Defective
RF modules might be the reason of imbalanced link.
 Check the site location such as possible coverage holes or no dominant cells.
 Perform drive test on that particular area to check the signal strength, if the average of
signal strength of the neighbors are the same, no dominant cell is found.
  For Long term action if no dominant cell shall be adding new site, while short term action
shall be uptilt the most dominant cell as the serving cell for that area and reduce coverage
for others.

Handover Failure due to same BCCH-BSIC

 Limited available radio frequency ARFCN owned by mobile operators would often
increase challenge of RF planning and optimization. Beside difficulty when assigning
frequency, one of impact of this is high handover failure due to configuring same BCCH
and BSIC on the neighbor.
 We can simply identify such impact by make a special query that meet such condition:
 “High handover failure in one direction AND 1st tier + 2nd tier neighbor have same BCCH-BSIC”

 On this situation, mobile station would be “fooled” during composing measurement

report to observed cell and handover shall be wrong be triggered and possibly increases
handover failure.
 Wireless network optimization can be started with network configuration audit which
cover inspection of high handover failure rate in one direction with above mentioned
situation is met.

Fishbone Diagram in Network Optimization

Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese quality control statistician, invented the

fishbone diagram. Therefore, it may be referred to as the Ishikawa diagram. The fishbone
diagram is an analysis tool that provides a systematic way of looking at effects and the causes
that create or contribute to those effects. Because of the function of the fishbone diagram, it may
be referred to as a cause-and-effect diagram. The design of the diagram looks much like the
skeleton of a fish. Therefore, it is often referred to as the fishbone diagram.
Network optimization is commonly close related to root-cause analysis. Lets take for example
identifying cause of dropped call that triggered by low signal strength.

Fishbone diagram is suggested to group all possible problem causes into common major
categories which labeled on the ‘bone’ of the ‘fish’, e.g. 4M (methods, machines, materials,
manpower); 4P (place, procedure, people, policies); 4S (surroundings, suppliers, systems, skills).

Refer to those categories, we might define all categories that more related to cellular
environment to be specifically dropped call. An fishbone for dropped call analysis can be figured
as it has categories of surroundings, antenna/feeder, hardware module, mobile subscriber, and
software system.

An extensive analysis base on drive test and on site verification, alarm data inspection,
configuration and radio parameter assessment, and network performance data analysis have to be
performed to see overall causes relation and judge ‘most likely cause’.
At this point, we will possible to define root cause base on its priority on which we are going to
validate through step by step proofing and finally found and decide the real root cause.

Dropped Call due to Sudden Drop

On circuit switch service, when a call is abnormally disconnected, a Clear Message

with cause code Call Control be treated as normal Disconnection is sent to the MSC – named
Clear Request Message.

Refer to Ericsson system, the following Urgency condition is checked at that time and the
relevant counter is incremented as a consequence:

1. Excessive TA
2. Low Signal Strength
3. Bad Quality
4. Sudden Drop

As named, stright forward meaning for the dropped call is described for the first three items.
However, Sudden Drop is quite not easy to understand.

Sudden Loss are drops that have not been registered as bad quality, signal strength, timing
advance. The term Sudden Loss is used because if the network cannot establish a connection
with the lost MS after a pre-defined period, the sudden loss counter is incremented if the last
reported measurement from the MS does not fulfill any of the reasons mentioned.

A connection is marked as Sudden loss if none of the three types of urgency states (that is
excessive TA, low signal strength or bad quality) are indicated and the locating procedure
indicates missing measurement results from the MS.

Drops due to ‘Other’ reasons are generally associated with hardware problems and disturbances,
number of drops due to ‘Other’ reasons is obtained by subtracting the drops with known reasons
from the total number of drops.

Main contributors in sudden and other TCH drop:

 Very sudden and severe drop in signal strength, such as when subscribers enter into
buildings, elevators, parking garages, etc.
 Very sudden and severe occurrence of interference or bad quality.
MS running out of battery during conversation.
 Handover Lost.
 BTS HW faults.
 Synchronization or Abis link fault (transmission faults).
 MS Faults.
 The growth and expansion of cellular network continues at a rapid pace throughout the
world. To retain the existing customers and attract new customers, wireless service
provider must maintain the highest quality of service throughout their networks. Drive-
testing remains an essential part of the network life cycle for continually optimizing
network performance to maintain customer satisfaction and reduce subscriber churn.


 Drivetest Evaluation Service
 To fit the customer needs and resources, we delivers various drive test evaluation services
with range of choices includes a complete end-to-end analysis with objective,
independent and standardized engineering reports and recommendations.
 It covers benchmarking evaluation, individual evaluation, end-to-end test and evaluation,
radio configuration and functionality test, troubleshooting test, radio parameters or
feature tuning purpose, etc.