An Energy Efficient Component Carrier Selection Mechanism for LTE-NR Dual Connectivity

In recent past, a new dual connectivity (DC) mechanism has been standardized to deal with two different radio access technologies, namely long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) and new radio (NR). The DC mechanism calls for a higher number of component carrier (CC) allocation which in turn causes increased power consumption. Moreover, to maximize the gain in DC mode, throughput received from the serving base stations need to be nearly equal. The existing CC allocation mechanisms do not take care of these facts. In this work, we first formulate the CC selection problem for LTE-NR DC as an integer linear program (ILP) which accounts load balancing across the serving BSs while minimizing CC allocation. The considered CC selection problem has also been shown to be NP hard. Due to such characteristics, we propose a suboptimal greedy algorithm to solve the CC selection problem. Simulation results confirm that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing CC selection algorithms.