Control Signaling Robustness in LTE

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In LTE, the control signaling required for scheduling and HARQ on the MAC layer is partly protected by cyclic redundancy checks (CRC) but no ARQ, or other error recovery mechanisms, are used. Therefore, errors occur with a certain probability and may or may not be detected. Errors in HARQ feedback and scheduling grants could cause underutilization of resources, longer delays, redundant retransmissions, collisions, and HARQ failures. In this study, the frequency of these effects, and the influence of control channel quality, data channel block error rate (BLER), and ACK/NACK detection thresholds are investigated. It is shown that the effects are acceptable small when the control channel performance is within the 3GPP target requirements.