Semi-JUS method for carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced systems

A semi-joint user scheduling (semi-JUS) scheme is proposed to improve the performance of advanced version of Long Term Evolution, i.e. LTE-Advanced, systems. The system is low cost and complex. Carrier aggregation (CA) based LTE-Advanced systems commonly adopt joint user scheduling (JUS) and separated random user scheduling (SRUS) schemes. The former is optimal in performance but with high complexity and the latter is simple but less efficient. In our proposed scheme, the user equipments (UEs) are limited to receive and transmit from only one of the component carriers (CCs) at any time, which ensures lower complexity compared with JUS. Moreover, the traffic load of each CC could be well balanced by switching the single connected CC for UEs in burst level using different burst dispatching principles. This leads to the significant performance gain compared with SRUS. Two classes of load balancing policy are applied in semi-JUS scheme, termed as round robin (RR) and shortest queue (SQ). We prove the superiority of the scheme with Poisson-based multiple flow traffic input by numerical experiments.