Downlink Traffic Scheduling for LTE-A Small Cell Networks With Dual Connectivity Enhancement

Small cells are a promising solution to increase the network capacity and to offload network traffic for LTE-A networks. In an LTE-A small cell network, there is one macro eNB (MeNB) and several slave eNBs (SeNBs). Recently, the dual connectivity technology is proposed for enhancing LTE-A small cell networks. For a user equipment (UE) that has dual connectivity, theMeNB can split the UE's downlink traffic and enable this UE to receive its downlink data from the MeNB and an SeNB simultaneously. In this work, we propose a downlink traffic scheduling (DTS) scheme for the MeNB to arrange the data rate of downlink traffic splitting to SeNBs for UEs that have dual connectivity. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively increase the network throughput for LTE-A small cell networks with dual connectivity enhancement.