Edge-prioritized channel- and traffic-aware uplink Carrier Aggregation in LTE-advanced systems

LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems support wider transmission bandwidths and hence, higher data rates for bulk traffic, as a result of Carrier Aggregation (CA). However, existing literature lacks efforts on channel-aware CA, especially in the uplink. The cell-edge users particularly suffer from exhaustion of resources, higher fading losses, lower SINR values (hence, requiring a higher power consumption) due to lossy channels that their traffic requirements are least-satisfied by channel-blind CA. This paper addresses the above concern by proposing an edge-prioritized channel- and traffic-aware uplink CA comprising Component Carrier (CC) assignment and resource scheduling. The LTE-A UEs are spatially-grouped and the under-represented edge UE groups, having the least assignable resources (good CCs), are prioritized for CA. This results in assigning the best channels to the edge groups. The frequency resources are scheduled to the groups based on inter-group and intra-group Proportional Fair Packet Scheduling (PFPS) in the time and frequency domains respectively, to resolve resource contention. The proposed approach outperforms the existing channel-blind Round-Robin and channel-aware Opportunistic CA, in terms of overall uplink throughput, by 33% in CC assignment and 21% in PFPS, in addition to significant throughput improvements for the edge UEs.