Method Study On PDCH Efficiency Improvement

With the development of mobile communications, the Packet Switched Data Service of 2G, the GPRS/EDGE, is being replaced by 3G and even 4G. But in some specific markets, the GPRS/EDGE is still serving the majority of Packet Switched Data Service for some operators, like China Mobile. The everlasting and high increase of user’s requirements of PS service consumes huge network resources, the operator has to expand its network to meet these requirements. But this can hardly solved only by network expansion. On one hand the speed of network expansion falls behind the speed of PS data service, on the other hand due to the limitation on frequency, more TRX in network cause more interference. At the same time, due to the advantage of network technology of its competitor, the ratio of earning on consumption of PS data service on resources is far below the speech service, for China Mobile. So it’s a must to increase the efficiency of GPRS/EDGE PS data service to mitigate the pressure of cost and network quality. China Mobile suggests a new KPI, Throughput per PDCH, as the evaluation of PDCH efficiency, and makes it one of the assessment KPIs of the 2010-2011 Network Quality Campaign. This article is mainly about the theory and methods study and practices on GPRS/EDGE network PDCH efficiency improvement, including the PDCH compressing, PDCH configuration optimization strategy, and related optimization work, like GRPS/EDGE channel administration, connection control and transfer, EDGE coding scheme optimization, radio network quality optimization, etc. These optimization methods study and practices in this article are done in the Ericsson BSS network of Hubei Mobile, and also some methods can be used and have been used in other vendor’s network in this operator. After a serie of optimizations, the Throughput per PDCH KPI of Hubei Mobile increased a lot, reached and exceeded the requirement from China Mobile Group. At the same time plenty of network resources saved, the network utilization rate decreased and the perception from end-users of PS data service is not affected.