Uplink VoIP Support for 3GPP EUTRA

Ravi Nory1, Ravi Kuchibhotla1, Robert Love1, Yakun Sun1 and Weimin Xiao2
1
Motorola Inc., Mobile Devices Business, 600 N US Highway 45, Libertyville, IL 60048
2
Motorola Inc., Networks Business, 1421 West Shure Drive, Arlington Heights, IL 60004
{eotd, ark005, qa2178, e11584, wxiao1}@email.mot.com

Abstract—Evolved UTRA (EUTRA) is currently under study by

3GPP standards organizations as a long term evolution (LTE)
for current generation Universal Terrestrial Radio Access
(UTRA) networks. One of the key aspects of EUTRA wireless
systems will be providing voice services in packet domain using
Voice over IP (VoIP). This paper provides system simulation
results evaluating uplink VoIP capacity for EUTRA.
Simulations indicate that if efficient control signaling and
scheduling mechanisms are in place, EUTRA systems can
support 80 to 130 Erlangs of VoIP traffic per sector in a
1.08MHz spectrum allocation as part of a 5 MHz LTE carrier.
Index Terms—3GPP, EUTRA, LTE, VoIP
II. EUTRA UPLINK FRAME STRUCTURE
Figure 1 shows EUTRA uplink subframe structure for a 5
MHz carrier bandwidth [1]. Each 1ms subframe (split into
two 0.5ms slots) has 12 Single Carrier FDM (SC-FDM) long
blocks (LB) and 4 short blocks (SB). The four SBs are
reserved for pilot symbols. Resources among various users
are shared in a FDM fashion with each user getting a one or
more resource blocks (RB). Each resource block consists of
a set of 12 consecutive subcarriers spanning the entire 1ms
subframe.

I. INTRODUCTION

In 3G wireless communication systems like UMTS, voice

services are currently provided only in circuit switched
domain. However, future systems like 3GPP EUTRA are
being designed to operate solely in packet domain. For these
systems, voice services can be provided by having an
additional overlay network like GSM. However, having a
single network that services both data and voice is more
efficient and cost effective. Therefore, it can be envisioned
that future packet based wireless networks like EUTRA will
be required to support a large portion of voice capacity that
Figure 1 – EUTRA Uplink Frame Structure
is currently being handled by circuit switched wireless (and
possibly wireline) networks.
III. VOICE TRAFFIC MODELLING
This paper studies the suitability of EUTRA networks for
supporting high capacity VoIP and describes a scheme for Speech activity for different UEs is modeled using a two
efficient scheduling and control channel signaling. Traffic state Markov model shown in the figure 2. Here, the
load for VoIP is symmetric in both the downlink and the probability of a user transitioning from a voice inactive state
uplink. Here, we only deal with the uplink VoIP capacity as 0 to voice active state 1 is given by P01 and the probability of
we believe that the overall VoIP capacity is uplink limited transition from state 1 to state 0 is given by P10 . Voice
due to user equipment (UE) power limitations.
activity factor λ is defined as the probability that a user is in
voice active state. This is given by
The paper is organized as follows. Section II briefly
describes EUTRA uplink frame structure. Section III P01
provides details on VoIP traffic modeling. Section IV λ= (0.1)
discusses difficulties related to VoIP control channel P01 + P10
signaling and describes an efficient scheduling mechanism to
resolve them. Section V provides VoIP capacity simulations For the simulations presented in this paper, transition
and summarizes key results. probabilities are set according to the recommendations given
in [2] resulting in an effective voice activity factor of 0.32.

1550-2252/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE 710

 of users can also be supported in downlink, sending separate
scheduling grants for each of the 10 DL + 10 UL users
individually will require a prohibitive amount of downlink
control signaling resources. In fact preliminary
investigations in [4] on control channel capacity for EUTRA
indicate that only a maximum of 6UL+6DL grants can be
accommodated in each subframe. However, the periodic and
predictable nature of VoIP traffic allows different optimized
Figure 2 – Two State Voice Activity model control signaling methods. Group scheduling is one such
example.
The speech model is updated at the voice encoder frame rate.
For an AMR voice encoder, the update interval is 20ms. With group scheduling, all the voice users in a cell are
Further, speech frames created by the AMR encoder are distributed into smaller groups and scheduling grants are
encapsulated by various headers to create VoIP packets. sent on a per group basis. Each group is assigned a particular
Table 1 gives details on the assumed header sizes (after group ID and the CRC of the group grant is color coded
Robust Header Compression (RoHC)) and ultimately the using the group ID. Further, the size each group grant is
payload size of each VoIP packet. typically the same size as that of an individual grant. As
multiple users share the same grant, precious downlink
control signaling resources are conserved. Figure 3, shows
Full Rate Half Rate
Data Type
(12.2kbps) (7.95kbps)
SID an example. Here, all the voice users in the cell are
distributed into five groups. A user assigned to a particular
AMR payload group will only wake up in subframes where his group grant
248 160 40
(Bits) is expected to be present. Group assignment is done when a
RTP/UDP/IP
1 24 24 24 user initiates a call. Other parameters such as voice codec
Header (Bits) rate are also conveyed to the UE during group assignment.
PDCP Header
16 16 16 Resource assignment within each subframe can be done
(Bits) using a simple bitmap. Each position in the bitmap
RLC Header
8 8 8 corresponds to a user in the group. A length 12 bitmap for
(Bits) group B is shown in the example. The bitmap indicates that,
CRC/ UEID users 2, 3 and 12 are assigned Resource Areas (RAs) 0, 1
(Bits)
16 16 16
and 2 initially and, 5ms later the same resources are
VoIP Packet
39 28 13 allocated to users 1, 6 and 12 (user 12 is sending a
(Bytes) retransmission).

Table 1 – VoIP payload size for different AMR rates

A B C D E A B C D E

IV. CONTROL SIGNALLING CONSIDERATIONS

Traffic model details given in Section III indicate that an

AMR full rate VoIP user typically generates

a) a new 39 byte voice packet every 20 ms along with the

associated headers when in voice active state or,
b) a 13 byte silence descriptor (SID) packet every 160ms in Resource Area 1

voice inactive state or, Resource Area 2

c) a 40-44 byte RoHC [3] (uncompressed header) packet 5MHz

Resource Area 3

every few seconds for RoHC state synchronization

maintenance.
Further a user is in voice active state only 32% of the time.
As VoIP packets are small, a large number of voice users
can be scheduled in each EUTRA subframe. For 5MHz
carrier bandwidth, a single 1ms EUTRA uplink subframe
can accommodate more than 10 VoIP users (assuming each Figure 3 – Group Scheduling for VoIP
user needs 2 RBs with QPSK rate 0.54). If an equal number
The size of each Resource area and the number of resource
1
This assumes that the user RoHC header is in compressed state. If areas allocated to each group is set semi statically and
RoHC synchronization is lost, the header can be as large as 44 Bytes for
signaled to the UE using higher layer signaling at a very low
IPv4 (larger for IPv6).

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rate (for example once every few seconds). As seen in the VoIP Capacity - 40ms Delay bound - 500m ISD
example, apart from the ‘transmit/don’t transmit’ indication, 100

the bitmap also conveys information about which resource

area to use. Further, information on modulation and coding
scheme (MCS) is also implicitly present in the bitmap. For
example, assuming each resource area spans two resource

%users with FER < 1%

95
blocks, a UE using full rate AMR codec will use QPSK rate
0.54 when transmitting in voice active state. Information on
whether the UE is in voice active or voice inactive state can
be conveyed by separate scheduling request and scheduling
release messages sent by the UE. 90

V. SIMULATION RESULTS Half Rate-Ideal CE

Half Rate-Realistic CE
This section presents results from network simulations Full Rate-Ideal CE

measuring EUTRA uplink VoIP capacity. All simulations Full Rate-Realistic CE

85
utilize the group scheduling concepts described in Section 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140
IV. Results are presented for a 6 Resource Block group cell loading (users/sector)

allocation (1.08MHz) as part of a 5MHz carrier. The 6
resource block allocation forms 24% of the available 25
resource blocks. The remaining resource blocks (that are not
2
simulated ) can be assumed to be supporting non-VoIP
traffic or more groups of VoIP traffic. Results are presented
for both full rate and half rate AMR encoder configurations.
Group scheduling is performed by randomly distributing the
users into 5 separate groups. For full rate AMR simulations,
per UE resource area size is set at a constant value of 2
resource blocks, while for half rate, RA size is set to 1
resource block. This configuration allows a maximum of 3
full rate or 6 half rate users to be scheduled in each 1ms
uplink subframe.
Figure 4 -Uplink EUTRA VoIP Capacity for 1.08MHz
Erlang capacity shown in Table 3 is measured as the
maximum load in a sector at which 95% of the users have a
frame error rate less than 1%. A frame is considered to be in
error if it is not successfully received at the base station
within the delay bound of 40ms.
Results show that VoIP capacity for EUTRA would be quite
high when compared to the capacity of current generation
wireless communication systems [6].
REFERENCES

A 19-cell x 3-sector hexagonal grid layout is assumed for the [1] 3GPP TSG RAN, TR 25.814 v7.1.0, “Physical layer aspects for
simulations. Detailed network simulation parameters are Evolved UTRA,” September 2006.
given in Table 2. Simulation parameters are based on the
[2] 3GPP TSG RAN TR 25.896, v6.0.0 “Feasibility Study for Enhanced
recommendations given in [1]. Figure 5 shows the Uplink for UTRA FDD”, March 2004.
transmission gain (path loss + antenna gain) distribution for
[3] RFC 3095, “Robust Header Compression (ROHC)”, IETF Network
the particular deployment scenario used in the simulations.
working group, July 2001 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3095.txt).
Figure 6 shows the corresponding received SINR
distribution. [4] R1-070030, “E-UTRA DL L1/L2 Control Channel Design” Motorola,
Sorrento, Italy, Jan 2007.

AMR Codec Erlang capacity Average [5] Weimin Xiao et al., “Uplink Power Control, Interference Coordination
Rate (kbps) (Realistic CE) IoT (dB) and Resource Allocation for 3GPP E-UTRA”, IEEE VTC Fall 2006.
7.95 131 8.6 [6] Weimin Xiao et al., “Voice over IP (VoIP) over cellular: HRPD-A and
12.2 83 8.4 HSDPA/HSUPA,” IEEE VTC Fall 2005
[7] 3GPP TSG RAN TR 101 112 v3.2.0, “Selection procedures for the
Table 3 – EUTRA VoIP capacity in a 1.08MHz allocation choice of radio transmission technologies of the UMTS” , April 1998.

Table 3 summarizes the simulation results. Figure 4 shows [8] R1-051335, “Simulation Methodology for EUTRA UL: IFDMA and
the corresponding outage plots. Results are shown with both DFT-Spread-OFDMA”, Motorola, Seoul, Korea, November 2005.
ideal and realistic channel estimation (CE). Figures 7 and 8 [9] R1-061551, “LTE Uplink System Performance for VoIP”, Motorola,
show FER distributions for full rate and half rate Shanghai, China, May 2006.
simulations.

2
All the cells in the system are assumed to be using the same set of 6
Resource Blocks for VoIP. While this is not a requirement, it ensures that
the interference environment created is similar to that seen by a system that
uses all the available RBs for VoIP.

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 Parameter Assumption
Deployment Scenario Case1 in [1] – 500m ISD, 2GHz Carrier Frequency, 20dB penetration loss
Carrier Bandwidth, RB allocation 5MHz , 1RB=12 subcarriers, 6RBs simulated for VoIP (rest not simulated)
Traffic Model Details given in Section III
SID frames modeled to be the same size as voice frames
RoHC header always assumed to be in compressed state
40ms Delay bound scheduling + HARQ retransmission delay
TTI 1ms (12 Long blocks for Data, 4 Short blocks for Pilot)
Cellular Layout Hexagonal grid, 57 cells (19 cell sites, 3 sectors per site)
Distance-dependent path loss L=128.1 + 37.6log10(.R), R in kilometers
Lognormal Shadowing Described in [7] Annex B 1.41.4
Shadowing standard deviation 8 dB
Correlation distance of Shadowing 50 m ([7] Annex D.4)
Shadowing correlation Between cells 0.5
Between sectors 1.0
Antenna pattern (horizontal)   θ 2


(For 3-sector cell sites with fixed antenna patterns) A(θ ) = − min 12  , Am 
  θ 3dB  
θ 3dB = 70 degrees, Am = 20 dB
Channel model 6-ray GSM Typical Urban (TU), 3kmph UE speed
UE TX power 24dBm
eNodeB Noise Figure 5dB
Minimum distance between UE and cell 35 meters
HARQ Synchronous with N=5 stop-and-wait HARQ protocol
(Chase combining)
Modulation QPSK
Scheduler Delay dependant scheduling within each group (UL CQI not used). HARQ
retransmissions given higher priority
CQI No Uplink Sounding
(Long term downlink CQI used for power control)
Link to System Mapping Symbol SINR computed using methodology described in [8]
E-UTRA UE Transmitter / BS Receiver 1x2 (1 antenna / 2 antennas – rx diversity)
Power control ON (details given in [5])
Channel Estimation Realistic (details given in [9])

Table 2 – Network Simulation parameters

Transmission Gain CDF - Case 1 - 500m ISD, 20dB Penetration loss Symbol SINR CDF
1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

0.6 0.6
CDF
CDF

0.5 0.5

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

Full rate - 80 users/sector

0.1 0.1
Half rate - 130 users/sector
0 0
-180 -160 -140 -120 -100 -80 -60 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20
Transmission Gain (dB) SINR (dB)

Figure 5 - Transmission Gain CDF for the deployment Figure 6 - Symbol SINR distributions of received
scenario used in the simulations SC-FDM symbols

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 VoIP FER CDF - case1, 500m ISD - 12.2AMR
1

0.99

0.98
Prob(user FER < abscissa)

0.97

0.96

0.95

0.94
Bold lines - Realstic CE
0.93 Dotted lines - Ideal CE

0.92
80 UEs/sector
0.91 90 UEs/sector
100 UEs/sector
0.9
-3 -2 -1 0
10 10 10 10
FER
Figure 7 - Frame error rate distributions for full rate AMR simulations

VoIP FER CDF - case1, 500m ISD - 7.95AMR

1

0.99

0.98
Prob (user FER < abscissa)

0.97

0.96

0.95

0.94 Bold lines - Realstic CE

Dotted lines - Ideal CE
0.93
110 UEs/sector
0.92
120 UEs/sector
130 UEs/sector
0.91
140 UEs/sector
0.9
-3 -2 -1 0
10 10 10 10
FER
Figure 8 - Frame error rate distributions for half rate AMR simulations

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