4.

5 Radio subsystem link control The radio interface is characterized by another set of functions of which we discuss only the most important in the following. One of these functions is the control of the radio link: radio subsystem link control, with the main activities of received-signal quality measurement (quality monitoring) for cell selection and handover preparation, and of transmitter power control. If there is no active connection, i.e. if the MS is at rest, the BSS has no tasks to perform. The MS, however, is still committed to continuously observing the BCCH carrier of the current and neighboring cells, so that it would be able to select the cell in which it can communicatewith the highest probability. If a new cell needs to be selected, a location update may become necessary. During a connection (TCH or SDCCH), the functions of channel measurement and power control serve to maintain and optimize the radio channel; this also includes adaptive frame alignment (section 4.3.1) and frequency hopping (section 4.2.3). Both need to be done until the current base can hand over the current connection to the next base station. These link control functions are performed over the SACCH channel. Two fields are defined in an SACCH block (Figure 4.18) for this purpose, the power level and the TA. On the downlink, these fields contain values as assigned by the BSS. On the uplink, the MS inserts its currently used values. The quality monitoring measurement values are transmitted in the data part of the SACCH block. The following illustrates the basic operation of the radio subsystem link control at the BSS side for an existing connection; the detailed explanation of the respective functions is given later. In principle, the radio link control can be subdivided into three tasks: measurement collection and processing, transmitter power control, and handover control. In the example of Figure 4.19, the process BSS_Link_Control starts at initialization the processes BSS_Power_Control and BSS_HO_Control and then enters a measurement loop, which is only left when the connection is terminated. In this loop, measurement data are periodically received (every 480 ms) and current mean values are calculated. At first, these measurement data are supplied to the transmitter power control to adapt the power of MS and AIR INTERFACE PHYSICAL LAYER 81 Figure 4.19 Principal operation of the radio subsystem link control. BSS to a new situation if necessary. Thereafter, the measurement data and the result of the power control activity are supplied to the handover process, which can then decide whether a handover is necessary or not. 4.5.1 Channel measurement The task of radio subsystem link control in the MS includes identification of the reachable base stations and measurement of their respective received signal level and channel quality (quality monitoring task). In idle mode, these measurements serve to select the current base 82 GSM ARCHITECTURE, PROTOCOLS AND SERVICES Table 4.6 Measurement range of the received signal level. Received signal level (dBm) Level From To RXLEV_0 110 RXLEV_1 110 109 ... ... ... RXLEV_62 49 48 RXLEV_63 48 station, whose PCH is then periodically examined and on whose RACH desired connections can be requested. During a connection, i.e. on a TCH or SDCCH with respective SACCH/FACCH, this measurement data are transmitted on the SACCH to the base station as a measurement report/measurement info. These reports serve as inputs for the handover and power control

algorithms. The measurement objects are, on the one hand, the uplink and downlink of the current channel (TCH or SDCCH) and, on the other hand, the BCCH carriers which are continuously broadcast with constant power by all BTSs in all time slots. It is especially important to keep the transmitter power of the BCCH carriers constant to allow comparisons between neighboring base stations. A list of neighboring base stations BCCH carrier frequencies, called the BCCH Allocation (BA) is supplied to each mobile by its current BTS, to enable measurement of all cells which are candidates for a handover. The cell identity is broadcast as the BSIC on the BCCH. Furthermore, up to 36 BCCH carrier frequencies and their BSICs can be stored on the SIMcard. In principle, GSM uses two parameters to describe the quality of a channel: the Received Signal Level (RXLEV), measured in dBm, and the Received Signal Quality (RXQUAL), measured as bit error ratio as a percentage before error correction (Tables 4.6 and 4.7). The received signal power is measured continuously by MSs and base stations in each received burst within a range of 110 to 48 dBm. The respective RXLEV values are obtained by averaging. The bit error ratio before error correction can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, it can be estimated from information obtained from channel estimation for equalization from the training sequences, or the number of erroneous (corrected) bits can be determined through repeated coding of the decoded, error-corrected data blocks and comparison with the received data. Since the data before error correction is presented as blocks of 456 bits (section 4.8), the bit error ratio can only be given with a quantizing resolution of 2 103. Again, the value of RXQUAL is determined from this information by averaging.