An efficient resource allocation algorithm with carrier aggregation in LTE Advanced systems

To achieve a higher data transmission rate, carrier aggregation (CA) technology has been included in the LTE Advanced standard. Allocating resources with CA is a crucial and challenging task due to the different types of user equipment (UE) that have different bandwidth capacities and operate under the same base station (BS). We have formulated the downlink resource allocation problem joining both carrier component (CC) allocation and resource block (RB) allocation to achieve proportional fairness in the long term. We also develop a maximum system utility (MSU) algorithm. Each time this algorithm tries to allocate the best CC to an narrow-band UE in which the number of CCs it is assigned does not exceed the number of CCs supported, maximizing the total utility until it can no longer grow. Importantly, NB UEs which can support more than one CCs are considered in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve total throughput compared with the existing algorithm both with and without fairness consideration.