A Survey of Radio Resource Management for Spectrum Aggregation in LTE-Advanced

Abstract

Abstract-In order to satisfy the requirements of future IMTAdvanced mobile systems, the concept of spectrum aggregation is introduced by 3GPP in its new LTE-Advanced (LTE Rel. 10) standards. While spectrum aggregation allows aggregation of carrier components (CCs) dispersed within and across different bands (intra/inter-band) as well as combination of CCs having different bandwidths, spectrum aggregation is expected to provide a powerful boost to the user throughput in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). However, introduction of spectrum aggregation or carrier aggregation (CA) as referred to in LTE Rel. 10, has required some changes from the baseline LTE Rel. 8 although each CC in LTE-A remains backward compatible with LTE Rel. 8. This article provides a review of spectrum aggregation techniques, followed by requirements on radio resource management (RRM) functionality in support of CA. On-going research on the different RRM aspects and algorithms to support CA in LTEAdvanced are surveyed. Technical challenges for future research on aggregation in LTE-Advanced systems are also outlined.

An Improved Radio Resource Management with Carrier Aggregation in LTE Advanced

“…Channel dependent packet schedulers are more accurate in real life scenarios as they consider more parameters than channel independent schedulers. Most of the previous researchers have used proportional fairness (PF) [5][6][7], Round Robin (RR) [8,9] and other algorithms [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] for resource allocation with CA in an LTE-A system. However, some important parameters, such as packet delay or error rate are not considered.…”

A Survey of Channel Bonding for Wireless Networks and Guidelines of Channel Bonding for Futuristic Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

“…± [19] WSNs 2011 ± [29] Wireless Networks 2012 ± [4] LTE-A 2014 [3] LTE-A 2014 ± The paper highlights the need to develop bandwidth aggregation solutions to get maximum benefit of aggregation strategy. Bandwidth aggregation is different from CB that in bandwidth aggregation, a node having multiple interface terminals can transmit data parallel on all available channels, hence providing load balancing, whereas CB physically bonds the contiguous available channels to make a broadband channel.…”

“…Two of the relevant works in this context are [3] and [4], where both have focused on channel aggregation techniques. In [3], authors classified various spectrum aggregation schemes and revealed that channel aggregation is a powerful mechanism of improving throughput, however, the rate of throughput increase does not follow the same pattern in case of high traffic flow.…”

“…In [3], authors classified various spectrum aggregation schemes and revealed that channel aggregation is a powerful mechanism of improving throughput, however, the rate of throughput increase does not follow the same pattern in case of high traffic flow. One more important aspect to maximize throughput while minimizing the control overhead is to assign as few channels as possible to conserve signal processing complexity and the node's battery power.…”

“…Also in channel aggregation, control messages exchange overhead increases with the increase in number of channels. Strategies for optimum channel selection can help to satisfy QoS requirements for channel aggregation in high speed networks [3]. In this regard, recently channel aggregation has also been adopted for future 5G networks [78].…”