Designing energy-efficient wireless access networks: LTE and LTE-advanced

As large energy consumers, base stations need energy-efficient wireless access networks. This article compares the design of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks to energy-efficient LTE-Advanced networks. LIE-Advanced introduces three new functionalities - carrier aggregation, heterogeneous networks, and extended multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) support. The authors develop a power consumption model for LIE and LIE-Advanced macrocell and femtocell base stations, along with an energy efficiency measure. They show that LIE-Advanced's carrier aggregation and MIMO improve networks' energy efficiency up to 400 and 450 percent, respectively

DOFDM for carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced

In Long-Term Evolution (LTE), maximum bandwidth allocation of channels in downlink and uplink is 20 MHz. To meet an increasing demand of data rate for users in next generation wireless communication systems such as LTE-Advanced, bandwidth up to 100MHz or above is required. A key technology to achieve higher bandwidths up to 100MHz is carrier aggregation. To provide maximum bandwidth to the users and optimum use of radio resources for the operators , the carriers of same or different bandwidths can be aggregated using carrier aggregation. This paper presents an overview of carrier aggregation algorithms and using Matlab simulations study feasibility of using Discontiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DOFDM) for carrier aggregation. It is concluded that DOFDM enables carrier aggregation without sacrificing bit error rates for users

Reducing the power consumption in LTE-advanced wireless access networks by a capacity based deployment tool

As both the bit rate required by applications on mobile devices and the number of those mobile devices are steadily growing, wireless access networks need to be expanded. As wireless networks also consume a lot of energy, it is important to develop energy-efficient wireless access networks in the near future. In this study, a capacity-based deployment tool for the design of energy-efficient wireless access networks is proposed. Capacity-based means that the network responds to the instantaneous bit rate requirements of the users active in the selected area. To the best of our knowledge, such a deployment tool for energy-efficient wireless access networks has never been presented before. This deployment tool is applied to a realistic case in Ghent, Belgium, to investigate three main functionalities incorporated in LTE-Advanced: carrier aggregation, heterogeneous deployments, and Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO). The results show that it is recommended to introduce femtocell base stations, supporting both MIMO and carrier aggregation, into the network (heterogeneous deployment) to reduce the network's power consumption. For the selected area and the assumptions made, this results in a power consumption reduction up to 70%. Introducing femtocell base stations without MIMO and carrier aggregation can already result in a significant power consumption reduction of 38%

LTE Carrier Aggregation Deployment – From Standardization to Deployment

Purpose: The objective of this research was to investigate LTE Carrier Aggregation commercial deployment and how soon it happened after standardization finalization. Because LTE Carrier Aggregation feature was expected to be important feature there is good reason to expect its deployment for real commercial markets.   Theoretical framework: The literature at time when standardization was ongoing predicted and speculated Carrier Aggregation feature as promising deployment selection. However there is room to investigate whether Carrier Aggregation happened shortly after standard specification work finalized.    Design/methodology/approach: Used methodology was to gather network operators’ and equipment manufacturers’ intentions for LTE Carrier Aggregation commercial deployment purposes during and after standardization finalization. Information found from public sources where commercial deployment intentions launched by companies.      Findings: The research showed that after and already before standardization finalized there were immediate intentions for LTE Carrier Aggregation deployment. Commercial trials appeared within one year and real commercial deployments appeared within two years from standardization finalization. That means soon deployments in commercial markets when considering deployment in licensed band.   Research, Practical & Social implications: For future works there could be study why not LTE Carrier Aggregation solutions in unlicensed band was not successful and whether there will be changes when going towards 5G standard related deployments.   Originality/value: This article is an academic contribution for innovation feature commercial deployment in telecommunications industry and investigation whether LTE Carrier Aggregation feature deployment happened as soon as expected

A Price Selective Centralized Algorithm for Resource Allocation with Carrier Aggregation in LTE Cellular Networks

In this paper, we consider a resource allocation with carrier aggregation optimization problem in long term evolution (LTE) cellular networks. In our proposed model, users are running elastic or inelastic traffic. Each user equipment (UE) is assigned an application utility function based on the type of its application. Our objective is to allocate multiple carriers resources optimally among users in their coverage area while giving the user the ability to select one of the carriers to be its primary carrier and the others to be its secondary carriers. The UE's decision is based on the carrier price per unit bandwidth. We present a price selective centralized resource allocation with carrier aggregation algorithm to allocate multiple carriers resources optimally among users while providing a minimum price for the allocated resources. In addition, we analyze the convergence of the algorithm with different carriers rates. Finally, we present simulation results for the performance of the proposed algorithm.Comment: Submitted to IEE

Carrier Aggregation in Multi-Beam High Throughput Satellite Systems

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is an integral part of current terrestrial networks. Its ability to enhance the peak data rate, to efficiently utilize the limited available spectrum resources and to satisfy the demand for data-hungry applications has drawn large attention from different wireless network communities. Given the benefits of CA in the terrestrial wireless environment, it is of great interest to analyze and evaluate the potential impact of CA in the satellite domain. In this paper, we study CA in multibeam high throughput satellite systems. We consider both inter-transponder and intra-transponder CA at the satellite payload level of the communication stack, and we address the problem of carrier-user assignment assuming that multiple users can be multiplexed in each carrier. The transmission parameters of different carriers are generated considering the transmission characteristics of carriers in different transponders. In particular, we propose a flexible carrier allocation approach for a CA-enabled multibeam satellite system targeting a proportionally fair user demand satisfaction. Simulation results and analysis shed some light on this rather unexplored scenario and demonstrate the feasibility of the CA in satellite communication systems

Modelling Load Balancing and Carrier Aggregation in Mobile Networks

In this paper, we study the performance of multicarrier mobile networks. Specifically, we analyze the flow-level performance of two inter-carrier load balancing schemes and the gain engendered by Carrier Aggregation (CA). CA is one of the most important features of HSPA+ and LTE-A networks; it allows devices to be served simultaneously by several carriers. We propose two load balancing schemes, namely Join the Fastest Queue (JFQ) and Volume Balancing (VB), that allow the traffic of CA and non-CA users to be distributed over the aggregated carriers. We then evaluate the performance of these schemes by means of analytical modeling. We show that the proposed schemes achieve quasi-ideal load balancing. We also investigate the impact of mixing traffic of CA and non-CA users in the same cell and show that performance is practically insensitive to the traffic mix.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to WiOpt201

Enabling RAN Slicing Through Carrier Aggregation in mmWave Cellular Networks

The ever increasing number of connected devices and of new and heterogeneous mobile use cases implies that 5G cellular systems will face demanding technical challenges. For example, Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) scenarios present orthogonal Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that 5G aims to satisfy with a unified Radio Access Network (RAN) design. Network slicing and mmWave communications have been identified as possible enablers for 5G. They provide, respectively, the necessary scalability and flexibility to adapt the network to each specific use case environment, and low latency and multi-gigabit-per-second wireless links, which tap into a vast, currently unused portion of the spectrum. The optimization and integration of these technologies is still an open research challenge, which requires innovations at different layers of the protocol stack. This paper proposes to combine them in a RAN slicing framework for mmWaves, based on carrier aggregation. Notably, we introduce MilliSlice, a cross-carrier scheduling policy that exploits the diversity of the carriers and maximizes their utilization, thus simultaneously guaranteeing high throughput for the eMBB slices and low latency and high reliability for the URLLC flows.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Proc. of the 18th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet 2020), Arona, Italy, 202