Carrier Load Balancing and Packet Scheduling for Multi-Carrier Systems

In this paper we focus on resource allocation for next generation wireless communication systems with aggregation of multiple Component Carriers (CCs), i.e., how to assign the CCs to each user, and how to multiplex multiple users in each CC. We first investigate two carrier load balancing methods for allocating the CCs to the users-Round Robin (RR) and Mobile Hashing (MH) balancing -by means of a simple theoretical formulation, as well as system level simulations. At Layer-2 we propose a simple cross-CC packet scheduling algorithm that improves the coverage performance and the resource allocation fairness among users, as compared to independent scheduling per CC. The Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced is selected for the case study of a multi-carrier system. In such a system, RR provides better performance than MH balancing, and the proposed simple scheduling algorithm is shown to be effective in providing up to 90% coverage gain with no loss of the overall cell throughput, as compared to independent scheduling per CC.