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Provided by the author(s) and University College Dublin Library in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title A QoS based call admission control and resource allocation mechanism for LTE femtocell deployment Authors(s) Olariu, Cristian; Fitzpatrick, John; Perry, Philip; Murphy, Liam, B.E. Publication date 2012-01-17 Conference details 2012 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 14 - 17 January 2012 Publisher IEEE Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/7524 Publisher's statement © © 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Publisher's version (DOI) 10.1109/CCNC.2012.6181184 Downloaded 2021-09-29T20:17:46Z The UCD community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters! (@ucd_oa) © Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. A QoS based call admission control and resource allocation mechanism for LTE femtocell deployment Cristian Olariu John Fitzpatrick Philip Perry and Liam Murphy Telecommunication Software NEC Laboratories Europe, School of Computer Science and Systems Group NEC Europe Ltd., and Informatics Waterford Institute of Technology, Kurfursten-Anlage 36, 69115 University College Dublin Cork Road, Waterford, Ireland Heidelberg, Germany Belfield 4,Dublin, Ireland Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Email: {philip.perry, liam.murphy}@ucd.ie Abstract — Current trends show a growing number of femtocell deployments, this in turn will lead to increased volumes of voice traffic being transmitted through fixed broadband access networks such as Digital Subscriber Line. In this paper the issue of maintaining call quality through the resource constraint expedited forwarding queue of DSLAMs is investigated. A quality based Call Admission Control and resource allocation mechanism is provided to avoid resource overloading and call quality degradation. The ITU-T’s E-Model is used for call quality monitoring and a message exchange interface between the mobile and fixed networks which allows dynamic adjustment to network resources is described and simulated. The results show that high voice call quality can be maintained. Keywords: femtocells, LTE, call admission control, QoS, Figure 1 - Voice over S1-U E-Model, MOS, DSLAM transmission to the HeNBGW located in the operator’s core I. INTRODUCTION network. The 3GPP have defined AMR and AMR-WB as the The Long Term Evolution (LTE) standards for cellular mandatory voice codec for LTE deployments. Each AMR systems have opened many new possibilities for future mobile VoIP call has a data rate in the region of 5 to 24 Kbps plus communications. These include concepts such as advanced Self overhead, depending on the codec mode that is being used. In Organizing Networks (SONs), policy based network the case of IPSec secured tunnelling that is used by all management and further integration of femtocells and femtocell deployments the overhead becomes comparable to femtocell networks [1,2]. The work presented in this paper the size of the actual payload. spans each of these three ideas. Specifically, this paper Upon egress from the femtocell each VoIP packet is tagged addresses the problem of congestion that can occur when a as voice using the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) large number of femtocells utilise Digital Subscriber Line field of the IP header, this allows the DSL Access Multiplexer (DSL) connections as a backhaul link. A method to enable both (DSLAM) to identify it as voice and provide low-latency Quality of Service (QoS) aware Call Admission Control (CAC) prioritization. In this work it is assumed that each Mobile and bandwidth negotiation in the backhaul links is proposed. Network Operator (MNO) operating femtocells utilizing the The algorithms developed are suitable for SON deployments Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) network can be individually and can be driven by a number of parameters that can be identified on a per flow basis. This could be done by providing adjusted by operator-defined policies. specific VLANs for each MNO using the ISP network, In LTE, the home base station is referred to as a Home therefore allowing the DSLAM to use the VLAN tag of each evolved Node B (HeNB) and connects to a HeNB Gateway packet to identify the MNO to which it belongs. (HeNBGW) through the customer’s fixed broadband At the DSLAM all voice traffic is forwarded through the connection, typically a DSL connection. This critical backhaul Expedited Forwarding (EF) queue. The EF queue provides the segment is often neglected in both research work and in real highest service level and is utilised for low latency and low femtocell deployments; it is assumed to be of secondary bandwidth services such as voice; however in typical importance to the radio link between the mobile unit and the deployments it has a fixed and relatively limited bandwidth. As home base station. Although the femtocells transport both the number of HeNB deployments increases it is likely that the voice and data, due to their real time requirements the voice increased number of calls in the EF queue on DSLAMs will connections are much more sensitive to constraints in the cause congestion and may exceed the maximum allocated backhaul network where, it is often not possible to provide bandwidth. This will lead to increased packet delays, jitter and guaranteed network resources. loss at the DSLAM with a corresponding impact on the voice Each voice call transported via a DSL connected femtocell call quality. Therefore, the quality of the call depends on both is essentially converted into a Voice over Internet Protocol the radio link from the customer's mobile device to their HeNB (VoIP) call and encapsulated into a tunnel (Figure 1) for and the level of congestion on the backhaul link [3]. In order to compute the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of the VoIP calls a modified variant of the E-Model algorithm [8] is used; specifically, our implementation of the E-Model has been adapted to support AMR voice [9]. The E-Model computes a MOS for each VoIP call based on a number of network metrics including delay, loss and jitter. Accurate end-to-end network delay can be difficult to obtain unless the nodes between which it is calculated are time synchronized. In [10] the motivation and constraints for maintaining time synchronisation between femtocells and the HeNBGW is presented. It is shown that rigorous requirements for clock and frequency synchronization have to be met, NTP [11] or PTP [12] being the recommended synchronisation protocols. Based on this the HeNBGW Figure 2 – Femtocell deployment and architecture maintains regular NTP message exchange with each femtocell In this work it is assumed that each MNO will have Service to ensure high clock synchronisation accuracy. In this work we Level Agreements (SLAs) in place with the ISP to provide a assume that such clock synchronisation exists. Indeed we maximum bandwidth at each DSLAM dedicated for their VoIP analysed network traces from real femtocell deployments to traffic. Although the MNO could overprovision the dedicated confirm that this clock synchronisation is used. resources on each DSLAM this would have increased costs. It is therefore of interest for the MNO to minimise the maximum III. ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION bandwidth that is reserved on each DSLAM while maintaining The network architecture shown in Figure 2 depicts a high voice call quality for their customers. typical femtocell deployment scenario. This was used as the The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. reference architecture on which the proposed control Section II presents other relevant work in the area; this is mechanism and simulations were developed. It is comprised of followed by an architecture description in Section III. The QoS multiple households and small offices that have HeNBs based CAC and dynamic resource allocation mechanism is then provided by the same MNO and connected through the same described in Section IV. Section V and VI give an overview of DSLAM to the MNO’s core network. It is assumed that each the simulation environment and results, respectively. This HeNB is connected to a DSL broadband router. paper is then concluded in Section VII. Information gathered from multiple DSLAM vendor datasheets showed that a typical DSLAM is capable of serving II. RELATED WORK approximately 1000 DSL connections. As a typical HeNB can There have been a number of other QoS based CAC support 4 user devices this means that potentially each DSLAM mechanisms. In particular, an End-to-end Measurement based may have to transport up to 4000 simultaneous voice calls. Admission Control (EMBAC) mechanism for VoIP was The other major parts of the MNO’s core network are also described in [4]. Here the authors use emulated VoIP streams shown but for the simulations these are assumed to have little as probes to emulate real VoIP traffic. This is also similar to or no impact on the call quality and, as such, are modelled with previously published work on QoS based handover fixed low delays. The callee endpoints are also assumed to be mechanisms for VoIP in which the authors utilise VoIP like connected via low delay links that have no impact on call probes to estimate call quality on candidate handoff networks quality. [5]. Our concept differs from the one presented in [4] in two Based on the current network architecture we determined respects. Firstly, we locate the objective voice quality two ways of creating the required interface between the MNO measurements in an intermediary node (i.e.