Impacts of joint packet scheduling for heterogeneous component carriers in multi-carrier systems

Component carriers (CCs) in a Long Term Evolution - Advanced (LTE-A) system are limited by maximum 100 radio bearers (RBs) on a 20 MHz CC due to a fixed 15 KHz subcarrier bandwidth. However it is able to be changed in the future, so that a study regarding heterogeneous CCs which have diverse RBs above 100 on a CC is needed at this moment. To support non-contiguous carrier aggregation (CA) with the these conditions, a heterogeneous joint CC packet scheduling algorithm interacting with a radio resource control (RRC) is considered in this paper. The performance of the joint CC packet scheduling algorithm on heterogeneous CCs with different channel characteristics has been analyzed and compared through computer simulations as well. According to the results, we found that an 800 MHz CC exhibits approximately 4 dB better channel gains than a 2.1 GHz CC. We also obtained a capacity increase of about 15-40% for a joint CC maximum rate (MR) algorithm and about 2-28 % for a joint CC proportional fair (PF) algorithm when the number of users is increased. On the other hand, in a round-robin (RR) scenario, we were unable to notice any differences between the independent CC and joint CC packet scheduling policies. Furthermore, looking at the impacts of different amounts of RBs on 800 MHz + 2.1 GHz CCs, we can conclude that a one-to-one RB ratio with respect to the MR, PF, and RR algorithms has a better performance compared to other cases, and thus, owing to the better channel gain, the smaller the RBs of the 800 MHz CC, the better the performance achieved.