Base Station Throttling Revisited

A couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts around doing throttling of heavy users directly at the base station so the current load can be taken into account as well. No need to throttle heavy users if nobody else is using the cell. While it was just a "Gedankenexperiment" a reader pointed my to this paper in which Ericsson actually describes just such an approach and says it has already implemented it in their RAN. Very interesting! The paper unfortunately doesn't contain a lot of information of how this is done from a technical point of view, i.e. how is the base station informed which users to prefer over others. If you know more, if this is not a state secret and some information about the feature is publicly available, please let me know!

6 thoughts on “Base Station Throttling Revisited”

  1. Hi Martin,
    I don’t know what the white paper you refer to describes, but it would be possible to adjust the scheduler in the base station to degrade the performance of heavy users in the MAC layer.
    As far as I know, each vendor has implemented a scheduler with proprietary extensions so operators can have the option to turn traffic shaping on directly on the base station.

    However, BTSs can be more advanced than that and may do traffic shaping in higher layers.

    I’d love to hear about this from a vendor directly.

  2. Huawei have some specific algorithms to throttle in the RAN based on ARP values… Don’t know more details unfortunately…

  3. So far as I understand this (not well enough, obviously) there’s a big difference between vendor support, which is now coming from Ericsson, and how the capability can be used in commercial networks.

    The next challenge appears to be working out the practical implmentation and defining use cases and commercial models where it makes sense.

    All that said, it seems a logical direction to go in.

    I wonder when we’ll see the first live operators?

  5. Throttling at the base station only makes sense imho for upstream traffic, i.e. close to the point where data enters the network. Otherwise a lot of resources in the core network already have been wasted. For downstream traffic a logical point for throttling or even blocking traffic would be a gateway node (e.g. GGSN). I think implementing such function for traffic control in both directions based on common operator policies is far from being reality today.

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