An optimal resource allocation with joint carrier aggregation in 4G-LTE

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for optimal resource allocation from multiple carriers for users with elastic and inelastic traffic in fourth generation long term evolution (4G-LTE) system. In our model, we use logarithmic and sigmoidal-like utility functions to represent the user applications running on different user equipments (UE)s. We use utility proportional fairness policy, where the fairness among users is in utilization (i.e utility percentage) of the application running on the mobile station. Our objective is to allocate the resources to the users optimally from multiple carriers. In addition, every user subscribing for the mobile service is guaranteed to have a minimum quality-of-service (QoS) with a priority criterion. Our rate allocation algorithm selects the carrier or multiple carriers that provide the minimum price for the needed resources. We prove that the novel resource allocation optimization problem with joint carrier aggregation is convex and therefore the optimal solution is tractable. We present a distributed algorithm to allocate the resources optimally from multiple evolved NodeBs (eNodeB)s. Finally, we present simulation results for the performance of our rate allocation algorithm.