Investigation on Downlink Control Channel Structure Using Cross-Carrier Scheduling for Carrier Aggregation-Based Heterogeneous Network in LTE-Advanced

Abstract

Carrier aggregation (CA) is one of the most important techniques for LTE-Advanced because of its capability to support a wide transmission bandwidth of up to 100MHz and heterogeneous networks effectively while achieving backward compatibility with the Release 8 LTE. In order to improve the performance of control information transmission in heterogeneous networks, cross-carrier scheduling is supported, i.e., control information on one component carrier (CC) can assign radio resources on another CC. To convey the control information efficiently, a search space is defined and used in Release 8 LTE. In cross-carrier scheduling, the optimum design for the search space for different CCs is a paramount issue. This paper presents two novel methods for search space design. In the first method using one hash function, a user equipment (UE)-specific offset is introduced among search spaces associated with different CCs. Due to the UE-specific offsets, search spaces of different UEs are staggered and the probability that the search space of one UE is totally overlapped by that of another UE can be greatly reduced. In the second method using multiple hash functions, a novel randomization scheme is proposed to generate independent hash functions for search spaces of different CCs. Because of the perfect randomization effect of the proposed method, search space overlapping of different UEs is reduced. Simulation results show that both the proposed methods effectively reduce the blocking probability of the control information compared to existing methods.