Fair Joint User Scheduling Based on Best Cqi for Carrier Aggregation in Lte-advanced

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is one of the main features in Long Term Evolution– Advanced (LTE-A). CA allows the target peak data rates in excess of 1 Gbps in the downlink and 500 Mbps in the uplink to be achieved by aggregating multiple component carriers (CCs) of 20 MHz for each CC. When CA is being put to use, it is vital to complement LTE-A systems with a robust and suitable resource scheduling scheme. There are two basic resource scheduling schemes; (i) Best CQI Scheduling and (ii) Joint User Scheduling (JUS). Since within LTE-A networks users with high data rates have increased exponentially, each scheme probably cannot accommodate the user’s requirement, thus a much simpler, robust, and efficient scheme that caters to real-time traffic patterns and applications needs to be established. This paper focuses on the development of a new and fair joint user scheduling algorithm with carrier aggregation in the downlink of LTE-A. To enhance the system fairness and higher resource utilization, a novel Proportional Fair (PF) scheduling algorithm has been introduced in this study. It is known as JUS-CQI. The proposed scheme has been implemented and validated using a system level simulator built in MATLAB. The impact of the scheduling scheme towards fairness, block error rate and throughput have been examined. Simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithm has improved the users throughput by 15% compared to JUS, and enhanced the system fairness by 8.33%. Furthermore, the results have shown that the required average received Signal-to-Noise power Ratio (SNR) satisfying the average Block Error Rate (BLER) of 10 using JUS-CQI is decreased by approximately 4.8 dB compared to JUS.