International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 3-5 July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Fair Channel Allocation Techniques for Clustered Cooperative Communication in LTE/LTE Advanced
Mohd Taha Ismail, Mahamod Ismail, Rosdiadee Nordin, Abubakar Miyim
Department of Electrical, Electronics & Systems Engineering Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi Selangor DE 43600, Malaysia mtaha@eng.ukm.my, mahamod@eng.ukm.my, adee@eng.ukm.my, ammiyim@eng.ukm.my

AbstractCell Clustering has been identified as one of the technique and mechanism for cooperative communication used in Long Term Evolution (LTE). However, the proposed mechanism is subjected to many difficulties in cooperative decisions. This paper gives an overview on clustering techniques for User Equipment (UEs) and eNodeBs (eNBs) being handled in the LTE/LTE-Advanced network such as static and dynamic clustering. Strategic channel allocation schemes are required to equally allocate bandwidth and communication channels to the eNBs. This tends to maximize system spectral efficiency when assigning channels to cells in a cellular network without interference with neighbouring. A new proposed fair channel allocation using a combination of a static and dynamic clustering is being introduced to improve the previous channel assignment techniques. Moreover, fairness among UEs and eNBs during subcarrier allocation under various propagation impairments has been investigated. By implementing dynamic clustering with fair channel allocation, the inter-cell interference is reduced, thus improving the throughput and networks performance. Keywords-component; Cell clustering; hybrid clustering; fair channel allocation; cooperative communication;

cooperative signal processing for the UEs at the coordinated eNBs for interference management purpose [2]. Efficient traffic management [3] is an important issue in wireless communication system. When many users share a smaller number of channels, there exists the probability that a user may not be able to obtain a connection when needed as a result of unavailability of free channels. Base station (eNBs) cooperation clustered as a set of cooperative eNBs that serve channel allocation to group of UEs. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II gives a brief description of the related base station clustering techniques and types of channel allocation in cellular networks. Section III describes the simulation model. The simulation results and discussions are presented in section IV. The conclusions are given in section V.

II.

CLUSTER AND CHANNEL ALLOCATION SCHEMES

I.

INTRODUCTION

LTE (Long Term Evolution) standardization within the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) produced a standard referred as 3GPP Release. LTE provided enhancements in radio performance improvements such as higher data rates and network changes to improve channel efficiency. High data rates of 100Mbps for high mobility networks and 1Gbps for low mobility networks, the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) has coined the term IMTAdvanced to refer to mobile systems whose capabilities exceeds those of IMT 2000 (International Mobile Telecommunications)[1]. LTE/LTE-advanced or IMT-Advanced as a cellular technology provider has greatly enhanced the capacity of wireless communication network with the increasing demand for integrated services to support high speed connectivity. This implies that cooperative communication utilizes the multi-cell

Cell Cluster coordination as shown as in Fig. 1 could be defined as a group of interconnected eNBs. This group of eNBs need to manage frequency re-use efficiently base on the available of frequency spectrum to minimize interference among nearby cells while serving services to the UEs. Frequency channel allocation is that physical channels are either permanently allocated to mobile station based on demand or shared at a time. Channel allocation schemes are considered to be one of solutions that technology provides to support more mobile users in cooperative communication when resources appear to be limited. A big effort of prior research work focused on resource allocation for macro-cellular networks. Since all the base stations are assumed to be equally loaded and transit same power, it is better that the mobile equipment be served by the base stations whose signals are strongly being received with the highest power. Also, considering the increased traffic aggregation within a particular cell and mild interference conditions, frequency reuse serves as a scheme to be used to serve most of the users within the cell [4].

978-1-4673-0479-5/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

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B. Channel Allocation In wireless radio communication networks, resource management and channel allocation schemes [9] are required to allocate bandwidth and communication channels to base station (eNBs) and terminal equipment (UEs). There are several strategies when considering channel allocation schemes: A fixed Channel Allocation (FCA) or static channel allocation system allocate specific channel to a specific cell. The allocated channels are set to maximize frequency reuse at the same time will increase the operational efficiency of a network. Dynamic Channel Allocation (DCA) is all channels are potentially available to all cells and are assigned to cells dynamically as UEs connected. The third category of channel allocation methods includes fixed and dynamic channel allocation systems call as a Hybrid Channel Allocation (HCA) which is the total number of channels available for services divided into fixed and dynamic sets [10].

C1 C2

C3
Figure1. Cluster with 7 cell

A. Cell Clustering The figure above shows three cells clustering C1-C3 of a group of 7 cells per cluster with numbers of reused channels within a particular cluster. The frequency reuse is a technique of reusing frequencies and channels within a communications system to improve capacity and spectral efficiency [5]. Three types of cell clustering are implemented in wireless communication to manage frequency reuse [6]. Static cluster cell is formed by the union of the cell locations [7] and the advantage of static clustering is simplicity, but problem may arise where the eNBs could possibly form the static clusters in order for the network performance to be maximized. The eNBs require high-speed backhaul to be within the clusters. In addition, there is no requirement for scheduling negotiation between clusters. However, as will be shown in the succeeding, the intra-cluster cell-edge region is limited, and the potential gains of eNBs are not maximized. Dyanamic Clustering is a Cooperative clusters periodically regroup [8]. Higher spectral efficiency as a result of increased intra-cluster cell-edge remains the major advantage of the dynamic clustering. However, the difficulty is the complexity in scheduling the backhaul connections that serves as the main disadvantage. Since the eNB clusters have to share the same time-frequency resources, a multi cluster scheduling is required to negotiate between clusters at each scheduling time slot. There is the need to harmonize the interoperability standards of different vendors in order to meet the required High speed backhaul connections between adjacent eNBs. Hybrid Clustering is the combination static and dynamic cluster. This techniques require intergration static and dynamic channel assign to UEs which enviroment a lot of mobile users connected to eNBs on the same time.

III.

SIMULATION MODEL

The Fair channel scheme proposed in this paper has two main parts: Static and Dynamic channel allocation, which is illustrated in Fig. 2. For the static assigned, the system allocate channel based on the signal strength and the distance of each UE from the eNBs. However, in the dynamic assigned, the system re-allocate channels based on calculated threshold of fair channel load on each base station (eNBs). The simulation is based on two scenarios as depicted in Fig. 3 vis--viz; static channel allocation base on UEs generated randomly by assigned channel frequency and dynamic channel allocation simulated by total number of channels assign to UEs fair on each of the eNBs. Consequently, fairness is calculated by assuming the total number of channels allocation in the cluster divide by total number of eNBs.
TABLE 1. SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter Cell radius No of base station (eNBs) No of mobile station (UEs) Carrier frequency Transmitted power Transmitter antenna gain Receiver antenna gain

Value 2000 m 7 100 2 GHz 43 dBm 15 dB 3 dB

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Also the received power by the UEs is calculated using the formula: PR = PT + Gt + Gr - Lp PR PT Gt Gr Lp The received power Transmitted power Transmitter antenna gain Receiver antenna gain Path loss of the link
30

(2)

20 2 10

-10

5 -20

-30 -30

-20

-10

10

20

30

Figure3. Simulated network structure.

The simulation illustrates that association is based on both received power and path loss for example, UEs are associated with the eNBs. However, it will be noted that channel gains are usually correlated with geographic distance between nodes, and nodes that are farther away from each other are not likely to cause significant interference to each other. Hence, a given eNB is assumed to make decisions only on the basis of a subset of (aggressor) base-stations which either causes a lot of interference to a mobile it serves or whose served (victim) mobiles receive a lot of interference from this eNB.

IV.
Figure2. The Flowchart of the Fair Channel Allocation

SIMULATION RESULTS AND DICUSSIONS

From the parameters given in table 1, the path loss propagation model for a typical urban environment could be calculated by the expression; Lp = 128.1 + 37.6 log10 (d) (1)

The simulation was repeated 10 times were carried out to evaluate the performance of channel allocation in mobile cellular networks. In our experiments, 100 mobile users were considered and each user accesses data streams from the given numbers of cells. These were put to test in order to evaluate the performance of the envisaged method. Figure 3 shows the various sizes of mobile users having access from different clustered cells as well as the allocated number of users to the clusters after implementing the proposed technique (there are several data sets for each number of

Where d is the distance of serving eNB and UE.

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clusters). Fig.4 (a) shows the result of fixed Channel Allocation (FCA) where there is a potential of eNBs was not fairly utilized. To improve this situation, a fair channel allocation method is introduced to ensure the resource was fairly utilized where the numbers of UEs allocated equally based on available resource. This was clearly demonstrated in Fig.4 (b). It is a clear demonstration that on the average, the proposed method provides reasonable fairness values as compared to the earlier methods discussed in this paper.
(a) No of users serve by BS 60

scheme as demonstrated. The nominal 8dB power as the difference between the randomly assigned from the fair assigned at an average probability. It could be seen that the fair assigned curve gives a value close to 1(about 98%). This could be translated to mean a better performance when fairness was introduced.
CDF for RSSI 1 0.9 0.8 Probability of RSSI < X 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 random assign fair assign 0 10 20 30 40 50 X RSSI(dB) 60 70 80 90

No of Users

40

20

4 5 6 7 BS Serv (b) No of users serve by BS after fair channel allocation

15 No of Users

10 0 -10 5

4 BS Serv

Figure6. RSSI distribution for different channel allocation schemes

Figure4. Numbers of UEs serve by eNBs.

V.

CONCLUSION

CDF for RSSI 1 0.9 0.8 Probability of RSSI < X 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 static MS moving 0 10 20 30 40 50 X RSSI(dB) 60 70 80 90

In this paper, we investigate the cell clustering with fair channel allocation techniques. Strategic channel allocation schemes are required to equally allocate bandwidth and communication channels to the UEs and eNBs. Moreover, fairness among UEs and eNBs during sub-carrier allocation under various propagation impairments was also investigated. By implementing dynamic clustering with fair channel allocation, the inter-cell interference is reduced, thus improving the throughput and networks performance. This strategy leads to significant sum-rate gains and enhances the fairness of the system. A new proposed fair channel allocation with hybrid clustering as a future research will be introduced as an effective way to improve spectral efficiency in cellular systems described earlier in the previous clustering techniques by using a combination of a static and dynamic clustering. REFERENCES
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Figure5. RSSI distribution for static and mobility.

The Cumulative distribution function (CDF) versus RSSI plotted in Fig. 5 show two scenarios which is UEs in static and moving environment. However, Fig. 6 shown CDF of the user rates from two different methods channel assign (random and fair) clustering schemes are shown. Except from sum-rate increase, dynamic clustering improves significantly the fairness amongst the UEs of the network. This can be seen from Fig. 6 as the CDF of the dynamic grouping scheme is steeper than the one corresponding to the static grouping

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