Radio Resource Management in Bunched Personal Communication Systems

Abstract: The traditional way of increasing capacity in a wirelesscommunication system has been cell splitting and fixedchannel-allocation based on prediction tools. However, theplanning complexity increases rapidly with the number of cellsand the method is not suitable for the large temporal andspatial traffic variations expected in the future. A lot ofresearch has therefore been performed regarding adaptivechannel allocation, where a channel can be used anywhere aslong as the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) is acceptable. Acommon opinion is that these solutions must be decentralizedsince a centralized one would be overly complex.In this thesis, we study the locally centralizedbunch conceptfor radio resource management (RRM) in aManhattan environment and show that it can give a very highcapacity both for outdoor users and for indoor users covered byoutdoor base stations. We show how measurement limitations anderrors affect the performance and wepropose methods to handlethese problems, e.g. averaging of measured values, robustchannel selection algorithms, and increased SIR margins. Wealso study the computational and signaling complexities andshow that they can be reduced by splitting large bunches, usingsparse matrix calculations, and by using a simplified admissionalgorithm. However, a reduction of the complexity often means areduction of the system capacity.The measurements needed for RRM can also be used to find amobile terminal's geographical position. We propose and studysome simple yet accurate methods for this purpose. We alsostudy if position information can enhance RRM as is oftensuggested in the literature. In the studied scenario, thisinformation seems to be of limited use. One possible use is toestimate the mobile user's speed, to assist handover decisions.Another use is to find the location of user hotspots in anarea, which is beneficial for system planning.Our results show that the bunch concept is a promisingcandidate for radio resource management in future wirelesssystems. We believe that the complexity is manageable and themain price we have to pay for high capacity is frequentreallocation of connections.Keywords:bunch concept, radio resource management,network-assisted resource management, base station selection,dynamic channel allocation, DCA, channel selection,least-interfered, interference avoidance, interferenceaveraging, handover, power control, path-loss measurements,signal strength, link-gain matrix, TD-CDMA, UTRA TDD, Manhattanscenario, microcells, mobile positioning, position accuracy,trilateration, triangulation, speed estimation