Carrier load balancing methods with bursty traffic for LTE-Advanced systems

In this paper we focus on LTE-Advanced performance under bursty traffic conditions, and devote our effort to the different methods for balancing the load across multiple carriers. These carriers are the component carriers (CCs) that belong to the same carrier frequency. They are bonded together in order to fulfill the requirement of wide spectrum in LTE-Advanced. We first derive the analytical model for a bursty birth-death traffic model with fixed payload size for OFDMA with different frequency domain packet schedulers. Applying this model for a multi-carrier system, we compute the performance for different system setups. The obtained analytical results are verified using extensive system level simulations. Based on the analytical and simulation results, it is suggested to assign the users on all CCs if a cell is not heavily loaded. Otherwise, assign each user with only one CC using the load balancing method of Round Robin is preferable, in the sense that it maintains good performance with low uplink overhead.