QoS-Aware and Fair Resource Allocation with Carrier Aggregation in LTE-A Networks

Abstract

With the rapid growth of bandwidth-intensive applications, Carrier Aggregation (CA) has been introduced in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) Networks to provide higher data rates. In this paper, we investigate the joint resource block allocation and link adaptation problem with CA in LTE-A dwonlink. The problem is formulated as an Integer Programming problem aimed at maximizing the cell throughtput while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) of each User Equipment (UE), in the form of the minimum transmission rate. We also consider the proportional fairness of radio allocation among UEs. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, we propose an efficient algorithm QA-PFRA. QA-PFRA consists of two phases. In the first one we assign radio resource to UEs successively for QoS requirements according to UEs' priority, and in the second one we assign CCs to other UEs to maximize the cell weighted throughput. We develop a simulator to evaluate the performance of QA-PFRA. For comparison, we also implement GA algorithm and ERAA algorithm. It is found that the cell throughput obtained by QA-PFRA is about 70 higher than that obtained by ERAA, and QA-PFRA can also achieve higher throughput compared with GA when the UEs are sparsely distributed in the cell. Furthermore, we can observe that Jain's fairness index obtained by QA-PFRA is about 10 higher than that obtained by GA and 40 higher than that obtained by ERAA.