Analysis of Joint and Partial Component Carrier Assignment Techniques in LTE and LTE-A

Large multimedia files are accessed by a high number of mobile users over the Internet. Therefore, the bandwidth demand for mobile Internet access is increasing exponentially. To answer users' demand, carrier aggregation is proposed in LTE-A. In carrier aggregation, the best available one or more component carriers of each band are assigned as primary and secondary component carriers to each user for efficient services. The previous works have significantly improved the performance of LTE-A by using efficient component carrier assignment methods. The previous works, however, have two limitations. First, they have not investigated which of joint or partial secondary component carrier assignment techniques shows better performance. Second, overall system performance is analyzed in order to evaluate methods by ignoring system behavior such as packet drops and delay metrics during carrier reassignment operations. Therefore, in this paper, firstly, packet drops and delay which are experienced by users during the carrier reassignment process are investigated. Secondly, joint and partial secondary component carrier assignment techniques are compared. Results show that the partial carrier assignment technique increases efficiency of resource usage, throughput rate up to 15% and decreases average delay time up to 12%.