Technical Documentation

Visualization of LTE cellular networks

in a JAVA-based radio network
simulator
Version 0.4

Author: Martin Krisell

Date: December 20, 2011

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator II

Status
Reviewed JL 2011-12-07
Approved

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
Project Identity
Group E-mail: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.isy.liu.se/en/edu/projekt
/kommunikationssystem/2011/lte_visualization/
Customer: Ericsson Research, Mjardevi, Linkoping
Hakan Andersson, [email protected]
Martin Hessler, [email protected]
Course Leader: Lars-Inge Alfredsson, ISY, Linkoping University
Phone: +46 13 282645, E-mail: [email protected]
Project Manager: Per Sundstrom
Tutor: Johannes Lindblom, ISY, Linkoping University
Phone: +46 13 281349, E-mail: [email protected]

Group Members
Name Responsibility Phone E-mail
(@student.liu.se)
Per Sundstrom Project Manager (PM) +46730398171 persu101
Johan Kihlberg Layout (LAY) +46705613935 johki834
Martin Krisell Documentation (DOC) +46709742457 markr088
Pradeepa Ramachandra Responsible for Testing (TST) +46737225763 prara394
Simon Tegelid Code style and maintenance +46703593963 simte660
(CSM)
Arwid Komulainen +46763190755 arwko071
Johan Nygardh +46702890116 johny894
Mattias Zeidlitz +46703471813 matze628
Sara Orn +46703507317 saror792
Document History
Version Date Changes made Sign Reviewer
0.1 2011-12-03 First draft. JN JL
0.2 2011-12-07 Proof read. JN JL
0.3 2011-12-07 Added definitions of abbrevia- ST JL
tions as well as some more text
0.4 2011-12-13 Updated according to comments MK JL
from JL
1.0 2011-12-20 First version MK JL

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
Contents
1 Introduction and Background 2

2 Overview of the system 2

3 Map View 2
3.1 Cellular Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3.2 Handover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

4 Physical Resource Grid View 3

4.1 Downlink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4.2 Uplink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

5 Protocol Stack View 4

5.1 Packet Data Convergence Protocol Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.2 Radio Link Control Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.3 Medium Access Control Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5.4 Physical Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

6 Future Work 6
6.1 MIMO View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 1

List of Abbreviations
16QAM 16 point Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
64QAM 64 point Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
ARQ Automatic Repeat Request

CDIO Conceiving Designing Implementing Operating

IP Internet Protocol
LTE Long Term Evolution

MIMO Multiple Input, Multiple Output

OFDM Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
PDCCH Physical Downlink Control Channel
PDCP Packet Data Convergence Protocol

PHY Physical
QPSK Quadrature Phase Shift Keying
RLC Radio Link Control
SC-FDMA Single Carrier - Frequency Division Multiple Access

SINR Signal to Interference-plus-Noise Ratio

TCP Transmission Control Protocol
VoIP Voice over IP

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 2

1 Introduction and Background

Simulations are a crucial part in the development of cellular systems. With larger and
more complex systems it becomes important to be able to visualize the output in an
organized manner. The goal of the project is to enable Ericssons radio network simulator
to visualize either the text based outputs which it produces or to visualize the simulation
results in real-time while the simulator is running [1].
This technical documentation contains descriptions of the elements in LTE that are vi-
sualized by the Visualization Tool developed by this project group. It also contains
motivations of why these elements are chosen. Focus is put on the aspects of LTE which
are visualized by the software. Description of the UI is left to the User Manual document,
and the inner workings of the software is covered by the code documentation extracted
through JavaDoc, which is included in this document as appendix ??.
The project is performed as a part of the TSKS05 Communication Systems CDIO course,
given at Linkoping University, in cooperation with Ericsson Research, Linkoping.

2 Overview of the system

The Visualization Tool consists of three separate views. Each one of these views consists
of a graphical visualization of some aspects of a cellular LTE network. The Map View
visualizes the geographical location of the user equipments and base stations. The Physical
Resource Grid visualizes the resource allocation in form of a frequency time grid. The
Protocol Stack View presents the flow of data in the system, as well as information about
the internal state of user equipments and the server that the user is connected to.

3 Map View
The Map view is responsible for displaying the geographical location of user equipments
and base stations. Since LTE is a cellular network, initial colour coding of the user
equipment is done according to the cell to which they belong. With the help of the entity
list, the user is given the option to choose a base station or user equipment that needs to
be highlighted in the map. An example of the map view is shown in figure 1.

3.1 Cellular Network

In a cellular network, the total area being serviced is split into several smaller cells.
Cellular networking architecture will help in reusing the allotted frequency spectrum more
efficiently. Each base station will consist of several base cells (sectors) and in order to
avoid interference with other base cells that might be reusing the same frequency range,
highly directional antennas are used. This architecture comes at the cost of having more
hand overs at the boundaries of the base cells; this includes handover between two base
cells within the same base station and hand over between two base cells from different
base stations. Hence, it is essential to have a good trade off between the number of base
cells and the handover overhead of the total system.

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 3

Figure 1: Example of the map view.

3.2 Handover
Since a user equipment will be connected to only one base cell at a given time, in the
implemented visualization system, the colour coding will hence change suddenly from the
colour of initial base cell to the colour of the destination cell during a handover.

4 Physical Resource Grid View

The Physical Resource Grid View visualizes the resource allocation for cells in the cel-
lular system. The frequency/time grid is divided into resource blocks in both time and
frequency. Each block is 1 ms wide in time, called subframes, and the frequency band is
divided into sub-bands. Each sub-band is divided into sub carriers. Normally, each sub-
band is 180 kHz wide and consists of 12 sub carriers spaced 15 kHz apart [2, ch 9.1]. The
reason for splitting the frequency spectrum into sub-bands and the time into subframes is
to achieve frequency diversity and give higher flexibility when allocating resources. Each
resource block can be transmitted at QPSK, 16QAM, or 64QAM. Resource allocation
has undergone a major change from earlier cellular systems. LTE allows a very dynamic
resource allocation which is well suited for packet switched traffic since it tends to be
bursty. Older cellular systems use a static resource allocation which is more suited for
circuit switched voice connections. Visualizing the Frequency Time grid is a major im-
provement over reading the raw log files since they can be very cryptic and hard to get a
good over all picture. An example of the Physical Resource Grid View is shown in figure
2. The numbers and color in the figure correspond to the user. More information about
the user interface can be found in [3].

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 4

Figure 2: Example of the physical resource grid view.

4.1 Downlink
Downlink allocations for a user can be grouped into sections of at least two resource blocks.
The downlink will always be transmitted at full power so there is no need for a power
display in the downlink. The first part of each subframe is devoted to the PDCCH. The
length of the PDCCH can be different for different subframes, but for a given subframe,
the length of the PDCCH channel will be the same.

4.2 Uplink
Uplink allocations for a given UE must be allocated continuously in the frequency domain,
in other words there cannot be any gaps in the allocation for a specific user. Since User
Equipments have a very stringent battery capacity and power requirement, the uplink is
transmitted at different power levels depending on modulation scheme and signal to noise
ratio, this can be visualized in the uplink section of the Physical Resource Grid View.

5 Protocol Stack View

The Protocol Stack View displays information about the TCP transport layer and the
IP network layer for the communication between a user and an Internet server. All
transmission of data can be supervised in this view, as well as the changes in the internal
state of the layers, e.g. the TCP congestion window size which keeps the load on the
network within reasonable limits and also ensures fairness between multiple users on the
same link. The view can easily be extended to show information about all communication
layers used in LTE. In the complete LTE system, the user plane protocol stack consists
of the layers described in the following sections. The layers are presented in order with
the highest layer (that is closest to the IP layer) first. Note that this is only a very brief
description of the responsibilities for the different layers. The complete function can be

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 5

found in the LTE specification [2]. An example of the Protocol Stack View can be seen
in figure 3. The details of the view are explained in [3].

Figure 3: Example of the protocol stack view.

5.1 Packet Data Convergence Protocol Layer

The PDCP layer is reducing the number of bits that are transmitted over the radio
interface by performing IP header compression. This is done by using a standardized
header compression algorithm called Robust Header Compression. This is an important
part of the LTE system, since all voice data is now sent as IP packets (VoIP), small headers
reduce the additional latency. In addition, the PDCP layer is responsible for managing
sequence numbers, as well as for encryption and decryption of data.

5.2 Radio Link Control Layer

The RLC layer is responsible for the segmentation/concatenation, retransmission han-
dling, and duplicate detection. Moreover, it ensures in-sequence delivery to higher layers.

5.3 Medium Access Control Layer

The MAC layer is responsible for the multiplexing of logical channels, uplink scheduling,
downlink scheduling, and also together with the physical layer, hybrid ARQ retrans-
missions. The HARQ system is a way of ensuring reliable transmission, by performing
retransmissions whenever data was lost or corrupted. Even if the retransmitted data con-
tains errors as well, a clever combination of the original packet and the retransmitted one
can recover the complete packet. Note that this is much more sophisticated than the way
TCP ensures reliability, and the reason for this is the much greater probability for error
in the wireless cellular system than in the wired Internet.

5.4 Physical Layer

The PHY layer is responsible for coding/decoding, modulation/demodulation, multi-
antenna mapping, and together with the medium access control layer, hybrid ARQ re-
transmissions. For the downlink, LTE is using OFDM and for the uplink, SC-FDMA. For

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 6

a detailed description of these, we refer to [2]. Note that different releases of the LTE
specification differs.

6 Future Work
6.1 MIMO View
Multiple antenna techniques are used to enhance the performance in terms of achievable
data rate and also in terms of quality of reception. In order to illustrate the changes in
data rate and quality of reception under different MIMO modes, a dynamically updating
plot can be used. This will be indicating the instantaneous data rate and also the SINR at
the user equipment with different colour coding is being used for different MIMO modes.

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation
 Visualization of LTE cellular networks
in a JAVA-based radio network simulator 7

References
[1] Lasse Alfredsson, Visualization of Cellular Networks in a JAVA-Based Radio Network
Simulator, TSKS05 Communication Systems, Project Directive. Version 1.1, 2011.

[2] Erik Dahlman, Stefan Parkvall, and Johan Skold, 4G LTE/LTE-Advanced for Mobile
Broadband, Academic Press, 2011.
[3] Per Sundstrom, User Manual, TSKS05 Communication Systems, User Manual Ver-
sion 1.0 2011.

Course name: Communication Systems E-mail: [email protected]

Project group: Group 1 Document responsible: Martin Krisell
Course code: TSKS05 Authors E-mail: [email protected]
Project: LTE Visualization Document name: Technical Documentation