Configuration of Dual Connectivity with Flow Control in a Realistic Urban Scenario

Dual connectivity (DC) is a promising technique to boost the user throughput performance by allowing user equipments (UEs) to receive data simultaneously from a macro cell and a small cell. In order to ensure high degree of realism and practical relevance of the results, we investigate the performance of DC in a realistic deployment based on three-dimensional data from a dense urban European capital area, assuming realistic flow control on the backhaul connections between the macro and small cell eNBs. It is found that the configuration of UEs with DC plays a critical role in the performance of DC under realistic conditions. A modified opportunistic cell association algorithm is proposed. Simulation results show that with proper configuration of UEs with DC, the performance of DC exhibits similar gains as observed in generic 3GPP scenarios.