A throughput-optimized component carrier selection algorithm for LTE-advanced systems

Carrier aggregation (CA) technology has emerged as a promising solution to provide up to 100MHz bandwidth in 3 GPP LTE-Advanced standards. An LTE-Advanced UE can work over scalable frequency bands but is limited to aggregate up to 5 component carriers (CCs) simultaneously. In this paper, it is focused on the CC selection algorithm to optimize the system throughput. First, two traditional CC selection methods named Random and Least Load CC selection are investigated, both of which can well balance the load across different CCs. However, through their assignment principles, it can be found that neither of them contributes to the system throughput improvement, which is also proved by the system-level simulation. To solve this problem, a throughput-optimized CC selection algorithm is derived in this paper. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy outperforms the traditional ones and the system throughput is dramatically improved.