Resource allocation for multi-carrier cellular networks

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is a promising approach to facilitate efficient use of fragmented spectrum in the next generation mobile communication networks. However, with CA the complexity of Resource Allocation (RA) increases in multi-carrier cellular networks. In this paper, an optimum RA algorithm is proposed to allocate Component Carriers (CCs), Resource Blocks (RBs), and Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) values among users. Our proposed method maximizes the total throughput, while at the same time maintains good throughput fairness among users. The numerical results show that the proposed method outperforms State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) solutions in both user-and cell-level performance metrics related to throughput, fairness and CC spectral efficiency.