Experiments on Asymmetric Carrier Aggregation Associated with Control Signaling Reception Quality in LTE-Advanced

Abstract

LTE-Advanced supports asymmetric carrier aggregation (CA) to achieve flexible bandwidth allocation by applying different numbers of component carriers (CCs) between the downlink and uplink. This paper experimentally clarifies the achievable downlink throughput performance when uplink control information (UCI) feedback mechanism using the physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH), which enables minimization of the UCI overhead while maintaining the required reception quality, is applied in asymmetric CA. The laboratory experimental results show that the stable reception quality control of the channel quality information (CQI) with the target block error rate (BLER) of 10-1 to 10-2 is achieved irrespective of the average received signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) when the control offset parameter of approximately 1.25 is used. We also show that the achievable downlink throughput when the CQI error is considered is almost the same as that in no CQI error case. Furthermore, based on the experimental results in a real field environment, a suburban area of Yokosuka city in Japan, we confirm stable adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) operation including target BLER control of the CQI on the PUSCH in asymmetric CA. The field experimental results also show that when CA with 5 CCs (90-MHz bandwidth) and 2-by-2 rank-2 multiple-output multiple-input (MIMO) multiplexing are employed in the downlink, the peak throughput of approximately 640Mbps is achieved even considering the CQI error.