Downlink Radio Resource Management for LTE-Advanced System with Combined MU-MIMO and Carrier Aggregation Features

In this paper we study the performance enhancement of a downlink LTE-Advanced system with a combination of the multi-user MIMO and carrier aggregation transmission techniques. Radio resource management for the systems with the combined features are proposed, and the system performance is evaluated. Extensive simulations with various traffic load condition from full buffer with fixed number of UEs to finite buffer with bursty traffic were considered in order to find out when and how these two features can support each other to improve the overall performance gain of the LTE-Advanced system. It is shown that MU-MIMO transmission technique can help to enhance the cell-edge performance of the CA system by 10%-40% depending on traffic load.