Whats is Uplink RSSI in LTE?

Uplink RSSI is referred as the uplink Received Signal Strength Indicator of the
totalwideband received power within the entire channel bandwidth. Having too
low or toohigh UL RSSI will contribute to poor quality in the network. Too low
RSSI could simplymean the cell is deaf and cannot listen to any UE. Possible
reasons arecomponents failure, incorrect parameter settings, incorrect
equipment installation, etc.On the other hand, too high RSSI is equally
undesirable. This case is more often seen.Due to the high noise interference, it
could likely lead to frequent drop calls, call setupfailure and poor voice quality.
Cells with UL RSSI > -90 dBm can be considered ashaving high UL interference.

There are no strict thresholds which would differentiate between

quality service and definite KPI degradation, but based on experience
and cases that have been investigated it has been established that
whenever the UL RSSI for any cell -114 dBm, it get prone to KPI
degradation, primarily affects dropped calls.

Tips to solve this:

I have experienced a small cluster of area got inteferred by RF signal jammer from a
prison. All 3G/2G network providers to suffer from it.

Especially on 3G where I am working on, the indication of having too high UL RSSI
level and poort retainabilities (mainly) rates have been observed, beside RRC.
the followings are my workaround which give me nothing to recover the
performances:
- change the UARFCN to another value (the operator has more than 1 carrier) --> no
impact
- reduce the idle and dedicated coverage by means of p-cpich, qrxlev, qqualmin,
minpwrmax, interpwrmax, maxpwrmax --> no impact
- increasing minpwrrl --> no impact
- downtilting the antenna --> no impact

2nd
Quite an interesting problem. Jammers are fairly simple devices but as you are
finding out they can cause big problems. They usually cover the whole band e.g
2100 MHz, 900Mhz, 1800Mhz which explains why changing the UARFCN didn't
accomplish much.
Have you done an RF survey of the area? Is the jamming signal fairly well contained
within the prison? If it is, then the UL RSSI is degraded due to the handsets in the
prison trying to access the network using ever increasing power.
As the RACH uses open loop power control they will keep ramping their power
according to the step sizes and number of attempts you have dictated as the
network operator.
If I was you I would have a look at the RACH related parameters and lower them so
the handsets don't power up as much during access attempts. You can also limit the
max power UEs can transmit as well (usually this is set to 21dBm).
Depending on your vendor you might be able to apply these changes on a per cell
basis which will be ideal as you don't want to change your whole RNC parameter
design just because of this jammer.
In some countries, the use of jammers is illegal (as the operator has paid to be able
to use that part of the spectrum exclusively) so you might want to explore that
aspect as well.

3rd
Appreciate in your thought.
Regarding the RACH related parameters, i have far earlier configured the utrancell settings
to follow the recommended ones:
maxPreambleCycle 32
powerOffsetP0 1

powerOffsetPpm -4
preambleRetransMax 32
preambleSignatures 65535
that would I believe makes the Ue slowly power up during access attempts. However I also
agree w/ you to limit the Ue Txpower upto certain level eventhough the highness of UL RSSI
(on node B) majority contributed by the Jammer rather than excessive UL Tx Power from
simultaneous Ues.
Anyway thanks for sharing your thought, I'll update you later w/ the results...
Try to change the max preamble cycle to 4, preamble retransmax to 8. I am sure this will
not help in anyway the signals from the jammers..but you should see a decent improvement
in accessibility.
As the previous poster had mentioned, make sure that Jammers are legal in your
state..over here it is totally illegal to use jammers and you can bring in the legal department
to take care of it.
There won't be any change if you change frequencies as jammers support many bands at
the same time.