Distributed carrier aggregation for LTE in the unlicensed spectrum

In this paper, we investigate the problem of global optimization for distributed carrier aggregation (CA) in LTE with unlicensed spectrum, using a game theoretic solution. To cope with the local influences and the distinct cost of different CA types, we propose a non-cooperation game which is proved as an exact potential game. Furthermore, we propose a concurrent log-linear learning based uncoupled algorithm to converge towards NE of the game. In this algorithm, concurrent learning is introduced to accelerate the convergence speed. It is shown that with the proposed game-theoretic approach, global optimization is achieved without exchanging information. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed game-theoretic CA approach.