Performance Evaluation of Carrier Aggregation in Long Term Evolution-Advanced

Abstract

Carrier aggregation is one of the promising features that enables expanding the bandwidth of the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system through aggregating multiple LTE component carriers (CCs) of the same or different frequency bands to support high data rate up to 1 Gbit/s. The LTE-Advanced users can transmit packets on all of the available CCs whereas the LTE users are limited to transmit packets on a single CC. But Carrier Aggregation (CA) functionality introduces new challenges for Radio Resource Management (RRM) function of network and becomes more complicated, of which one significant aspect is the requirement of CC selection method. To solve this problem CC selection method needs to be carefully designed. In this research two CC selectors implemented there are All CC selector and Cyclic CC selector, also their performance evaluated using LTE-A downlink system level simulator conducted with MATLAB. Simulation results show that All component carrier selector outperforms the Cyclic CC selector in term of average cell throughput, average user equipment (UE) throughput and spectral efficiency by 225.16%, 214.35% and 163% respectively. While Cyclic outperforms the All in term of fairness by 47%. The reduction in the fairness index in All selector implies that, the scheduler has an increased task in resource allocations due to the added component carrier.