Automatic configuration of random access channel parameters in LTE systems

In 3G long term evolution (LTE) systems, the random access channel (RACH) is used for initial access, resource request, and handover. Since the random access delay is determined by the arrival rate of the random access preambles and the number of RACH subframes, we should configure the number of RACH subframes given the arrival rate in order to guarantee the delay performance. In this work, by carefully taking account of a tradeoff between the number of RACH subframes and the random access delay, we present an optimization formulation that minimizes the number of RACH subframes for a given delay requirement. Furthermore, since the arrival rate of the random access preambles is time varying in reality, we further propose an estimation scheme for the arrival rate by reflecting the periodicity and the correlation between recent and future arrival rates. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme for tuning the RACH subframes gives very promising network performance under time-varying environments.