An efficient downlink packet scheduling algorithm in LTE-Advanced systems with Carrier Aggregation

Abstract

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is one of the promising features to support the much wider bandwidth for packet transmissions in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems. To the best of our knowledge, works regarding the packet scheduling algorithm in LTE-A systems with the CA mechanism have not thoroughly been investigated yet till now. In this paper, we therefore aim to design an efficient packet scheduling algorithm based on the proportional fair criterion in such environment. We focus on downlink transmissions supporting both Real-Time (RT) and non-RT traffics simultaneously. Simulation results show that performance measures in terms of the system throughput, the mean delay, and the fairness are much better than those of a system in which component carriers are not aggregated but used independently.