Inter-cell carrier aggregation for next generation cellular systems with non-uniform traffic

In next generation mobile communication systems, the traffic distribution is expected to be non-uniform between cells due to diversified traffic sources and large amount of user traffic. The traffic non-uniformity between cells not only makes communication quality non-uniform between cells, but also decreases the system capacity. In this paper, we focus on carrier aggregation (CA) technique which aggregates two or more component carriers (CCs), and propose an inter-cell carrier aggregation scheme for accommodating the non-uniform traffic between cells. The inter-cell CA scheme applies the ordinary CA technique to the CCs at adjacent cells to achieve the higher CC utilization, leading to the mitigation of the negative effect caused from the traffic non-uniformity. The performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme improves throughput at user equipments (UEs), and mitigates the non-uniformity in the delay performance due to non-uniform traffic distribution.