A dynamic scheme for user load balancing in a multi-carrier LTE-Advanced network

Abstract

To achieve ever increasing demand for higher user throughput, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) have introduced Carrier Aggregation (CA) feature in the Long-Term Evolution — Advanced (LTE-A) standard. Wherein, the CA feature widens the transmission bandwidth by aggregating multiple Component Carriers (CCs) to meet the demand for higher data rate. To the best of our knowledge, till now available literatures have not addressed the challenges related to presence of multiple carriers in a base station system which usually results in the problem of user load imbalance among carriers due to improper and static user load assignment across CCs. In this paper, to solve the above challenges, we present a Dynamic and Optimal CC Load Balancing Scheme (DOCC-LBS) for user assignment across CCs via Multi-Objective Optimizations in which both, core network traffic load and channel quality conditions of CC are taken into account. The proposed novel dynamic load balancing scheme effectively balances the user load across CCs while achieving high user throughput. The analytical model and simulation results reveal that under the proposed mechanism the average user throughput doubles when compared with existing load balancing schemes such as Round Robin (RR) and Maximum Component Carrier to Interference (MCCI).