UTRAN LTE Downlink System Performance under Realistic Control Channel Constraints

In the UTRAN long term evolution (LTE), the downlink data channel is shared among the active users through the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technique, and high gains can be achieved by using dynamic packet scheduling. Control channels introduce an additional overhead, but also play a key role in exploiting such gains. This paper focuses on the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) and introduces the main PDCCH related features which need to be analyzed in order to minimize its impact on the system performance.