Performance Analysis of Dual-Carrier HSDPA

The newly standardized Dual-Carrier HSDPA offers two-carrier aggregation on the downlink. In this paper, we investigate the performance gains from the dual-carrier operations with both full buffer and bursty traffic models. With full buffer traffic, dual-carrier offers dynamic load balancing and increase in user data rate, system capacity and spectral efficiency. All the users throughout the system enjoy the data rate increase. With bursty traffic, dual-carrier provides substantial gain in user experience measured by burst rates or latency under all loading conditions. Moreover, the gain with bursty traffic is universal not only for all the users but also for a very wide range of scheduling algorithms. Our results are based on analysis and extensive simulations. Design issues are also addressed in this paper.