Load Based Carrier Aggregation Algorithm for LTE Advanced

Long Term Evolution (LTE) supports transmission bandwidth upto 20MHz. Nowadays the multimedia rich applications connects billions of users worldwide. These services demands more number of Resource Blocks (RBs) to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and that can increase the data traffic in multifold. This crunch has led the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to increase the transmission bandwidth in order to fulfil the QoS requirements of the different services. In Release10, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provides a provision for MNOs to use Carrier Aggregation (CA) scheme in LTE-Advanced to aggregate upto five Components Carriers (CCs) of existing LTE carriers at the eNB to increase the transmission bandwidth upto 100MHz. Further, this scheme allows a User Equipment (UE) to transmit and receive data packets simultaneously on multiple CCs based on UE capability to meet the service requirements. However, the CC selection and efficient RBs utilization plays a vital role to optimize the system performance. Hence, in this paper using QualNet 8.2 network simulator the Load Based Carrier Aggregation Algorithm (LBCAA) is proposed for LTE-Advanced to aggregate the CCs of the existing LTE carriers at the eNB based on cell load in order to increase the transmission bandwidth to handle the data traffic growth. The simulations results illustrated that the proposed LBCAA for LTE-Advanced outperforms in the achieved average unicast received throughput, average unicast end-to-end delay and jitter as compared to LTE.