Monday, June 25, 2012

Automatic Neighbour Relation in LTE


Manually provisioning and managing neighbor cells in traditional mobile network is challenging task and it becomes more difficult as new mobile technologies are being rolled out while 2G/3G cells already exist. For LTE, task becomes challenging for operators, as in addition of defining intra LTE neighbour relations for eNBs operator has to provision neighboring 2G, 3G, CDMA2000 cells as well.


According to 3GPP specifications, the purpose of the Automatic Neighbour Relation (ANR) functionality is to relieve the operator from the burden of manually managing Neighbor Relations (NRs). This feature would operators effort to provision 


Figure below shows ANR and its environment as per 3GPP. It shows interaction between eNB and O&M due to ANR.
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The ANR function resides in the eNB and manages the conceptual Neighbour Relation Table (NRT). Located within ANR, the Neighbour Detection Function finds new neighbours and adds them to the NRT. ANR also contains the Neighbour Removal Function which removes outdated NRs. The Neighbour Detection Function and the Neighbour Removal Function are implementation specific.


An existing Neighbour cell Relation (NR) from a source cell to a target cell means that eNB controlling the source cell knows the ECGI/CGI and Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) of the target cell and has an entry in the NRT for the source cell identifying the target cell.


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