Component Carrier Management for Carrier Aggregation in LTE-Advanced System

Abstract

This paper focuses on investigating appropriate management of Component Carriers(CCs) in carrier aggregation(CA) system, which is identified as one of the most distinct features of 4G systems including Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A). An LTE-A user equipment (UE) is allowed to concurrently utilize multiple carriers, which leads to scalable increase in user throughput. However, in certain circumstances, aggregating entire available carriers for a UE is not meaningful due to probably low channel quality or high traffic load in some of the CCs. Therefore, how to make good use of multiple carriers in real deployment scenarios is an important issue. Based on the analysis of resource allocation across multiple carriers in Layer-2, two CC management methods in Layer 3 are proposed. The proposed method is shown by simulation results to be effective in providing comparable user throughput with lower implementation complexity, as compared to solely ingenious resource allocation.