A survey of component carrier selection algorithms for carrier aggregation in long term evolution-advanced

Given that the demand for real-time multimedia contents that require significantly high data rate are getting of high popularity, a new mobile cellular technology known as Long term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) was standardized. The LTE-A is envisaged to support high peak data rate by aggregating more than one contiguous or non-contiguous Component Carriers (CCs) of the same or different frequency bandwidths. This paper provides a survey on the case where the LTE-A is working in backward compatible mode as well as when the system contains only LTE-A users. Note that the backward compatible mode indicates that the LTE-A contains a mixture of the legacy Long Term Evolution Release 8 (LTE) users that support packets (re)transmission on a single CC and the LTE-A users that are capable of utilizes more than one CCs for packets (re)transmission. It can be concluded from the study that the CC selection algorithms for newly-arrived LTE users can benefit from the channel diversity and the load status whereas the carrier aggregation that does not allocate all of the available CCs to the newly arrived LTE-A users shown to be more efficient

Dynamic downlink aggregation carrier scheduling scheme for wireless networks

Carrier aggregation has been accepted as a means of bandwidth extension in the third generation long-term evolution advanced (LTE-advanced) network, in an effort to support high data rate transmission with backwards compatibility. Since there are two or more component carriers (CCs) to be aggregated, it is crucial to design efficient carrier scheduling schemes. In this study, the authors propose a novel dynamic aggregation carrier (DAC) scheme for downlink transmission, which enables CCs to aggregate with each other in a dynamic manner. The dynamic nature of the new scheme allows the total capacity of all CCs to be fully utilised to serve flows, whereas the number of aggregated supplementary CCs is decreased so as to lower the computational complexity at user equipment (UE). Furthermore, the performances of the new scheme and two other carrier scheduling schemes are evaluated thoroughly through both analytical and simulation results. It is demonstrated that the DAC scheme offers good performances in terms of delay and throughput while reducing energy consumption and the signalling overhead at UEs