Classifications

• • H—ELECTRICITY
  • H04—ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
  • H04W—WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
  • H04W72/00—Local resource management
  • H04W72/50—Allocation or scheduling criteria for wireless resources
  • H04W72/52—Allocation or scheduling criteria for wireless resources based on load
• • H—ELECTRICITY
  • H04—ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
  • H04L—TRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHIC COMMUNICATION
  • H04L47/00—Traffic control in data switching networks
  • H04L47/10—Flow control; Congestion control
  • H04L47/30—Flow control; Congestion control in combination with information about buffer occupancy at either end or at transit nodes
• • H—ELECTRICITY
  • H04—ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
  • H04W—WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
  • H04W24/00—Supervisory, monitoring or testing arrangements
  • H04W24/10—Scheduling measurement reports ; Arrangements for measurement reports
• • H—ELECTRICITY
  • H04—ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
  • H04W—WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
  • H04W28/00—Network traffic management; Network resource management
  • H04W28/02—Traffic management, e.g. flow control or congestion control
  • H04W28/06—Optimizing the usage of the radio link, e.g. header compression, information sizing, discarding information
• • H—ELECTRICITY
  • H04—ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE
  • H04W—WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
  • H04W28/00—Network traffic management; Network resource management
  • H04W28/02—Traffic management, e.g. flow control or congestion control
  • H04W28/10—Flow control between communication endpoints
  • H04W28/14—Flow control between communication endpoints using intermediate storage

Definitions

• the present invention relates to methods and arrangements in a telecommunication system, in particular to an efficient buffer status encoding.
• LTE long term evolution
• 3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership program
• a scheduling mechanism similar to the one used in Enhanced D-Channel Handler (E-DCH) shall be adopted for LTE.
• the scheduler in a Node B schedules resources in both downlink and uplink.
• the scheduler needs information about the data that is available in the buffers of the user equipments (UE) . This is achieved by transmitting scheduling information messages from the user equipment to the Node B.
• the scheduling information is transmitted as part of the Medium Access Layer Protocol (MAC) and can therefore be either piggybacked with other transmissions (when those are ongoing) or be sent stand alone by creating MAC PDUs just to transfer the scheduling information.
• MAC Medium Access Layer Protocol
• the scheduling information in E-DCH has the format depicted in figure 1.
• HLID denotes the Highest priority Logical channel ID
• TEBS denotes the Total E-DCH Buffer Status
• HLBS denotes the Highest priority Logical channel Buffer Status (which is a value that is coded relative to TEBS, i.e. a percent of indicated TEBS value)
• UPH denotes the UE Power Headroom (which field relates to the power used in the UE) .
• the scheduler can determine the logical channel that has the highest priority (HLID) , how much data that is stored in the UE buffer for this logical channel (HLBS) , and the total UE buffer size (TEBS). In total this information is encoded in 13 bits.
• LTE- long-term evolution
• E-DCH enhanced mobile broadband
• the E-DCH solution has some limitations. If the user equipment has data on several logical channels (radio bearers) it is only possible to see the amount of data on the channel with the highest priority. It is, however, not possible to know if the remaining data has rather high, low, or very low priority. It is neither possible to know how the data is distributed between these priorities. This means that it is difficult to achieve service differentiation for any other service than the one with highest priority.
• a prior-art solution to this problem is to signal the buffer status per radio bearer (or per priority/QoS class) .
• the number of bits for the buffer size of each radio bearer (or priority/QoS class) needs to be rather low, e.g. 2 bits per buffer as will be used in the following.
• This solution implies the disadvantage that it provides a very poor granularity when in comes to the total buffer size of the user equipment.
• the total UE buffer is then encoded with only 2 bits, which is not sufficient.
• the number of bits per buffer can be increased but that leads to a large buffer status message.
• One conceivable option could be to encode the total buffer size separately. In that way relatively few bits could be used to encode the buffer size for each radio bearer (e.g. 2 bits) and an additional N bits could be used to encode the total buffer size. This would result in both a rough view of the buffer size per radio bearer as well as a reasonable accurate indication of the total buffer size. However, this would also lead to a large total buffer status message.
• a wireless system such as, e.g., a LTE-system or a High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) evolution system
• Figure 1 illustrates the E-DCH scheduling information format .
• FIG. 2 illustrates the problem of the prior-art solution.
• Figure 3 illustrates a buffer format indicator according to the present invention.
• Figure 4 illustrates the format for data on a single radio bearer.
• Figure 5 illustrates the format for data on many radio bearers .
• Figure 6 illustrates a block diagram of a method according to the invention.
• FIG. 7 block diagram of an arrangement according to the invention .
• the present invention provides an adaptive buffer status format where the user equipment autonomously, or by help of appropriate criteria, selects the format that is most efficient for the momentary buffer content.
• the encoding of the buffer fill levels for the case of several radio bearers uses the information from the buffers on the individual radio bearers in order to reduce the number of bits needed to encode the information of the total UE buffer size.
• the invention relates to a method in a wireless communication systems for efficient reporting of scheduling information processed in a unit of said system, as illustrated in figure 6.
• the method comprises the steps of: adaptively selecting (610) a buffer status format 615 for indicating the buffer fill levels of the scheduler; and encoding (620) the buffer fill levels.
• the encoding step is to reduce 625 the number of bits needed to encode the information of the total buffer size.
• a first embodiment of the present invention relates to an adaptive buffer status report format.
• the format of the buffer status report that is efficient to use depends on the momentary buffer fill levels on the individual radio bearers as well as on how many radio bearers are configured, which services are ongoing, etc.
• the user equipment should therefore be allowed to select (e.g. autonomously) the format of the buffer status report to minimize the number of bits needed (or maximize the information that can be extracted with a fixed number of bits).
• the basic structure of the buffer status report is depicted in figure 3.
• the buffer format indicator field 31 e.g. of length 1 or 2 bits
• buffer report formats In these examples the total number of bits has been chosen as 12 but only in order to illustrate the possible relations of the field sizes in the various formats. In practice the different formats can, however, have different lengths since the receiver of the buffer status report can deduce the length of the format from the buffer format indicator.
• radio bearer id (RBid) in a field 41, for instance of length 3 bits, and the buffer fill level in a field 42 of a length of, e.g., 9 bits. This is shown in figure 4. It is expected to be a common case that data is only available on a single radio bearer. This format provides a very high granularity of the total buffer size in that common case.
• radio bearers In order to provide service differentiation, it is necessary to report information about the amount of data for different radio bearers, or groups of radio bearers, per QoS class, per traffic priority or a similar criterion.
• radio bearers is used for reasons of simplicity. In the example depicted in figure 5, four radio bearers are configured.
• the buffer fill level B, denoted Bk, for each configured radio bearer k is encoded into N bit fields 51,52,53,54.
• the mapping between Bk and the buffer fill level interval is most likely hard coded in the specifications but can also be configurable by higher layer signaling.
• the information extracted from the fields Bl...B4 is used to improve the granularity of the information in the following way:
• An alternative coding for the case of several radio bearers is to first encode the total size of the UE buffer in one field, Btot, and then encode the buffer fill levels for each individual radio bearer Bk as a fraction of the value indicated in Btot.
• Bk and Btot indicate an absolute buffer fill level is that the value range of Btot is smaller than the value range of the possible buffer fill level.
• a user equipment can select a buffer status format. It is one possibility that the format can be configured via higher layer signaling protocol (e.g. the RRC) such that a user equipment always uses the same format. This format can then be reconfigured, e.g., depending on the number of services that are configured. According to another possibility the user equipment can autonomously select which format to use. This selection can depend, e.g., on the buffer fill levels of the individual radio bearers. For instance, if data is only- available on one radio bearer a certain format is selected while otherwise, i.e. for several radio bearers, another format is selected. Finally, the user equipment can alternate between the formats. This could achieve both a high granularity of the total buffer fill level as well as information about the data on individual radio bearers.
• the RRC Radio Resource Control
• radio bearers RRC signaling, SIP, VoIP, Video, Best effort (BE) internet access.
• RRC signaling SIP
• VoIP Voice over IP
• VoIP Voice over IP
• BE Best effort
• a multimedia telephony service is configured with the service components SIP signaling, VoIP and Video.
• RRC signaling radio bearer is configured and a best effort bearer used for internet access.
• An example of a mapping between QoS indicator and priority order is shown in the table below (in practice the priority order would be a list of radio bearer IDs) . The mapping between QoS indicator and priority order would be configured in the UE via RRC signaling.
• the scheduler would use QoS indicator 1 which indicates that radio bearers should be scheduled in the default order of priority.
• QoS indicator 1 indicates that radio bearers should be scheduled in the default order of priority.
• the BE internet access bearer this would be detected by the Node B scheduler and scheduling would be performed with QoS indicator 2 for a while, which would give a higher priority to the BE.
• QoS indicators 3 or 4 would be used if the radio bearers carrying VoIP or Video needs more resources than their default priority allows.
• the BE internet bearer is not even included, which implies that data from this radio bearer is not allowed to be transmitted.
• the RRC signalling always have the highest priority in the example. That is a likely implementation choice but nothing prevents RRC to be down prioritized as well.
• Figure 7 illustrates an exemplary unit 700 according to the present invention, for example in a UE, comprising a scheduler 710 for scheduling information processed in one or more buffers 720.
• the unit further comprises a processing arrangement 730 for adaptively selecting a buffer status format for indicating the fill levels of the scheduler buffers and an encoder 740 for encoding the buffer fill levels such as to reduce the number of bits needed to encode the information of the total buffer size.
• the unit further comprises a transmitter 750 for transmitting an information element including the buffer status report to other network units. The unit is described very briefly including the functional units essential for carrying out the invention.

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• Engineering & Computer Science (AREA)
• Computer Networks & Wireless Communication (AREA)
• Signal Processing (AREA)
• Mobile Radio Communication Systems (AREA)
• Alarm Systems (AREA)
• Transceivers (AREA)
• Multi-Process Working Machines And Systems (AREA)

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