Investigations of Component Carrier Selection Algorithms 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 Component Carriers (CCs) of the same or different frequency bandwidths. Since the inter-band non-contiguous carrier aggregation is likely to be used due to the current frequency allocation, this paper provides a performance study of a number of CC selection algorithms for use in the inter-band non-contiguous downlink LTE-A. It should be noted that CC selection is of paramount importance in the LTE-A operating in backward compatible mode as the LTE-A contains a mixture of the legacy Long Term Evolution (LTE) users that support packets (re)transmission on a single CC and the LTE-A users that utilize more than one CCs for packets (re)transmission. Simulation results demonstrated the efficacy of the Channel-Throughput Aware (CTA) algorithm for maximizing the system capacity without compromising the required Quality of Service of real-time video users.