A Dual Priority Component Carrier Selection Algorithm in LTE-Advanced Systems

In order to meet the growing demand of higher transmission rate, carrier aggregation (CA) technology has been proposed in 3GPP Release 10. In a backward compatible LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system with CA, a well-designed component carrier (CC) selection scheme is critically significant for system performance, especially when lots of user equipment (UE) with different CA capabilities are coexisted. This paper presents a novel dual priority CC selection (DPCS) algorithm, considering not only UE's CA capability but also carrier load and channel conditions on different CCs. Simulation results demonstrate that the given algorithm is able to improve the system performance in terms of throughput and fairness compared to the existing algorithms.

I. Introduction

To meet the growing demand of mobile communication, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduces carrier aggregation (CA) technology in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, which provides higher data rates, lower latency and better coverage by aggregating multiple component carriers (CCs). In LTE-A systems, a user equipment (UE) with capability for CA could be assigned more than one CC, which means that the UE can utilize more resource blocks (RBs) on multiple CCs. As a result, the UE's throughput can be significantly improved. However, the radio resource management (RRM) of LTE-A systems becomes more complicated. It is because that, in addition to RB allocation, CC selection strategy also needs to be carefully designed.