LTE UE performance evaluation for carrier aggregation and voice-over-LTE

As the perpetually increasing demands of users for high speed, higher data rates over wide bandwidths, lower system latencies in mobile communications, LTE/LTE-Advanced as a 4th Generation of Wireless networks infrastructures widely deployed to provide better support for these requirements. Carrier Ag-gregation(CA) is an important technology for LTE-A providing enhancements to peak data rates, both uplink and downlink, allowing the User Equipment(UE) to receive data on more than one LTE carrier. This increased complexity is expected to affect the UE current consumption. As LTE is restricted with packet-switched services only, the 3G native circuit-switched (CS) voice mechanisms are used in LTE to support voice calls and SMS. For this purpose, the network operator may consider Circuit-switched fallback(CSFB) or IP-Multimedia Subsystems(IMS) as alternatives, for concerned voice quality, call continuity and reliable SMS delivery in deployed LTE networks. In this paper, the performance of UE under CA(10+10 MHz) is analyzed for maximizing data throughput and also describes how the CA affects UE current consumption measurements with different traffic profiles. As a part of Voice over LTE(VoLTE), this paper evaluates the performance of UE under CSFB with its effect on peak data rates and reliability on IMS for deploying voice and SMS services.