International Conference on Computer and Communication Engineering (ICCCE 2012), 3-5 July 2012, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Capacity Evaluation of Carrier Agreggation Techniques in LTE-Advanced System

Ibraheem Shayea, Mahamod Ismail, and Rosdiadee Nordin
Dept. of Electrical, Electronic & Systems Engineering Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 43600 UKM Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia Shaia2009@yahoo.com, {mahamod, adee}@eng.ukm.my

AbstractIn Long Term Evaluation (LTE)-Advanced system, Carrier Aggregation (CA) technique that provide substantial enhancement in data rate transmission for downlink and uplink over wider bandwidth have been proposed. The basic idea of CA technique is to aggregate several smaller contiguous or noncontiguous components, thus concurrent radio resources across multiple carriers are utilized. This paper overview CA technique including data aggregation schemes, bandwidth structure, and CA implementation in LTE-Advanced systems. A simulation model for LTE-Advanced in the downlink has been developed to investigate the impact of CA using up to five Component Carriers (CCs) on the system performance in terms of average throughput and number of active users per cell with respect to non-CA. Simulation show that CA improves the system performance in term of average user throughput within the cell coverage area as CCs increases. Furthermore, CA implementation can enhance the system capacity in term of number of active users in each cell. Keywordsthroughput. Carrier Agreggation; LTE-Advanced System;

100 MHz, thus improve the system capacity in every cell. Furthermore, LTE-Advanced standards is expected to outperform the requirements of the IMT-Advanced systems in term of peak data rates, transmission bandwidth, high system capacity, peak/average spectrum efficiency, delay performance in control and user planes, mobility and provide maximum flexibility in utilizing the scarce radio spectrum available to operators with very good substantial improvement for cell-edge spectral efficiencies. The rest of this paper presents a comprehensive overview of CA technique in Section II, followed by the description of the simulation model and parameters in section III, then the simulation results and discussion are presented in section IV, finally section V concludes the paper. II. CARRIER AGGREGATION

I.

INTRODUCTION

With an ever increasing demand on wireless broadband services consuming higher data rate and wider bandwidth, the IMT-Advanced system has initiated the standardization process for the next-generation (4G) mobile communication systems. The 3GPP has been submitted LTE-Advanced (Release 10 (R10)) to be the standard for the 4G system since it will support high peak data rates for Users Equipments (UEs),, up to 1 Gbps in static and pedestrian environments, and up to 100 Mbps with high mobility speed in downlinks (DL) and 500 Mbps in uplink (UL) [1][2]. LTE-Advanced system (R10) is seen as the next major evolutionary step in the continuing development of LTE system. The expectation of implementing LTE- Advanced system is to fulfill the requirement of IMTAdvanced requirements. The major components that have been developed in LTE-Advanced system (R10) are a wider bandwidth through aggregation of multiple Component Carriers (CCs), evolved use of advanced antenna techniques with multi-antenna extensions in both UL and DL and Relaying techniques in order to meet the IMT-Advanced targets. One of the important features of the LTE-Advanced (Release 10) standard is the Carrier Aggregation (CA). CA is achieved by aggregating five CCs over wider bandwidth up to (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM))
978-1-4673-0479-5/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

A. Concept of Carrier Aggregation The basic concept of CA is defined as a set of several operating bands across, which the BS aggregates carriers with a specific set of technical requirements. These operating bands consist of continuous or non-continuous CCs. Both types of CA probably can use the same or different bandwidths to support higher transmission data rate over a wider bandwidth, starting from 20 MHz up to 100 MHz for a single UE unit in DL or UL between LTE-Advanced eNB and the UE, while preserving backward compatibility to legacy systems [1], [2], [3]. Continuous CCs is easier to be implemented at the physical layer structure of LTE-Advanced system, thus ease to resource allocation and management algorithms compared to the noncontinuous CA [2]. However, there is some difficulty to allocate continuous 100 MHz bandwidth for mobile wireless systems. CA with non-continuous CCs technique provides a practical approach to enable mobile network operators to fully utilize their current spectrum resources, including the unused scattered frequency bands and those already allocated for some legacy systems, such as GSM and 3G systems. But obviously, for non-continuous CA, the deployment of multiple RF receiving units and multiple FFTs is unavoidable in LTEAdvanced UE. Since non-continuous CA supports data transmissions over multiple separated carriers across a large frequency range, the radio channel characteristics and transmission performance, such as propagation path loss and

99

Doppler shift, vary a lot at different freque ency bands, and should be fully evaluated and considered i in the design of aggregation algorithms. In term of spectrum scenarios, CA supports different type of spectrum scenarios: (i) intra-band Contiguou us, (ii) intra-band non-contiguous and (iii) inter-band non-contig guous are some of the spectrum scenarios that have been propose ed for CA used in LTE-Advanced system [1]. With the develop pment of specific RF requirements, in the DL, both intra - and inter-band scenarios are considered in LTE-Advanced sy ystem (R10). But UL is focusing on intra-band scenarios only, due to the difficulties in defining RF requirements f for simultaneous transmission on multiple CCs with large frequ uency separation, considering realistic device linearity. Advanced systems Furthermore, implementing CA in LTE-A (R10) allow fast and seamless connectivity during handover from the source to the target eNBs and als so allow smooth network migration and upgrades. Therefore, it is essential to ensure backward compatibility of LTE-A design, so that, UEs for both LTEs (R8, R9) and LTE-Advance ed (R10) will be supported by the same carrier that is dep ployed by LTEAdvanced (R10). In CA defined for LTE-Advanced (R10), this is ascertained since each CC is compatible wi ith LTE (R8, R9) and has one of the bandwidths defined in LTE (R8, R9). This would also allow reuse of (R8, R9) R RF designs and implementation at the eNB and UE [1]. B. Data Aggregation Schemes There are two types of aggregation schemes have beenproposed to aggregate the CCs in [2]. In the first scheme, the CCs are aggregated at physical layer as sho own in Fig. 1 (a), but one HARQ entity is used for all the aggre egated CCs. Also, in this scheme, new transmission configura ation parameters should be specified for the entire aggregated b bandwidth. In the second scheme, the CCs are aggregated in M MAC layer with independently configured transmission parame eters for each CC as shown in Fig. 1 (b). Furthermore, this sch heme can support more flexible and efficient data transmission ns in both uplink and downlink, at the expense of multiple con ntrol channels. In d, since the same this way, backward compatibility is guaranteed physical layer and MAC layer configuration n parameters and schemes for the LTE systems can be used for r the future LTEAdvanced systems compared to the physical-la ayer scheme.
MAC HARQ MAC HARQ MAC HARQ

Data Agreggation

MAC HARQ

MAC HARQ

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

CC 1

CC 2

CC 3

CC 4

(b) Figure 1. (a) Data aggregation schem mes at physical layer. (b) Data aggregation schemes at MAC M layer [2]

C. Aggregated Bandwidth Structure As shown in Fig. 2, the structur re of aggregated bandwidth by using carrier aggregation techn nique consists of sub-band, guard band and guard resource. The sub-bands and the independent RF band are aggregate ed with other sub-bands to form a larger bandwidth for tra ansmitting LTE-Advanced signal, each sub-band has center fre equency and it is located at the center of sub-band. The cen nter frequency should be punctured for reducing DC offset. Also, A the center frequency of sub-band is the center frequency of each sub-band. In addition, each sub-band maintains on its origi inal structure for supporting UE with single carrier even if it is i aggregated to the larger bandwidth. As for the guard band, it is the guard subcarriers and it does not be used in data transmission, which is located at the edge of aggregated bandwidth h. Also, with regard to the guard resource, it is the additional subcarriers to be available for transmission after carrier aggr regation. The size of each guard resource depends on the band dwidth of two adjacent subbands. Furthermore, the aggrega ation of sub-band, guard resource and guard band is known n as aggregated bandwidth. Each aggregated bandwidth has ce enter frequency; this center frequency is the center of the total aggregated bandwidth. It can be located either guard resource or a sub-band [4].

Data Agreggation

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

Physical Layer

CC 1

CC 2

CC 3

CC 4

Figure 2. Basic structure of agg gregated bandwidth [4] (a) (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM))

100

III.

SIMULATION MODEL

A. Simulation Scenario A simulation scenario for the considered LTE-Advanced system downlink model as shown in Fig. 3. There are 19 eNBs macro cell using frequency reuse factor (FRF) of 1, i.e. all cells use the same frequency band as cell # 1. Each eNB coverage is hexagon in shape located at it center with radius of 750 km. We assume that 60 UEs are generated randomly in the coverage area of the centre cell (cell # 1). All UEs move at a fixed velocity of 60 km/hr in directions selected randomly at each simulation cycle. The distance between any adjacent eNBs is set to 3R where R is the radius of cell in km (R = 750km).
3000 9 2000 19 Distance in meter 1000 6 0 18 5 -1000 17 16 15 -3000 -4000 -3000 -2000 -1000 0 1000 Distance in meter 2000 3000 4000 4 14 1 3 13 2 12 8 7 10 11

The LTE-Advanced system profile defined by 3GPP is used as a reference [5]. The main simulation parameters are listed in Table II. The system performance is evaluated in terms of average cell capacity and average numbers of active users per cell. In this simulation, the system throughput and number of active user are collected over all the simulation time, and then averaged out to give the effective average cell throughput for active users. Furthermore, the effect of using different numbers of CCs is also been investigated.
TABLE II. SIMULATION PARAMETERS FOR LTE-ADVANCED SYSTEM COEXISTENCE Assumption (LTE-A) 46 dBm 15 dBi 30 m 5 1.5 m 0 dBi 9 dB 35 m 128.1+37.6 log10 (R) + 21.log10 (fc/2.0) , R [km], f [GHz]. 10 dB -174 dBm/Hz 20MHz, 40MHz, 60MHz, 80MHz and 100 MHz 2 GHz. Investegate from 1 to 5CCs. 180kHz 15kHz 12 Subcarriers 16 RBs (Total: 500 RBs (DL) )

eNB UE

Parameter eNBs max Tx power eNBs antenna gain (include feeder loss) eNBs antenna height eNBs Noise Figure UE height UE antenna gain UE noise figure min distance between UE to eNB. Pathloss model log-normal fade shadow White noise power density System Bandwidth Carrier frequency No of Carrier Componenet Resource Block (RB) size Subcarrier (SC) size Subcarriers number per RB RB number per active UEs

-2000

Figure 3. System layout including of cell layout eNBs and UEs distributions.

In this study, five scenarios are proposed to investigate the effect of implement CA on the system performance in term of throughput and number of active users per cell. The operating carrier frequency starts from 2 GHz for all five carriers f1, f2, f3, f4 and f5 located in the same band with different system bandwidth for each scenario as illustrated in Table I. The antenna gains and transmitted power on the five carriers are identical, while the shadow fading is depending on the location of the receiver antenna.
TABLE I. Scenario NO
Scenario # 1

SCENARIOS TYPES IN THE SIMULATION Description Non-CA with 1 CC (CC1) , CC bandwidth = 20MHz Total System BW = 1 * 20MHz = 20 MHz CA with 2 CC (CC1 and CC2) , CC bandwidth = 20MHz Total System BW = 2 * 20MHz = 40 MHz CA with 3 CC (CC1, CC2 and CC3) , CC bandwidth = 20MHz Total System BW = 3 * 20MHz = 60 MHz CA with 4 CC (CC1, CC2, CC3 and CC4) , CC bandwidth = 20MHz Total System BW = 4 * 20MHz = 80 MHz CA with 5CC (CC1, CC2, CC3, CC4 and CC5) CC bandwidth = 20MHz Total System BW = 5 * 20MHz = 100 MHz

B. Performance Evaluation In this research, the downlink OFDMA-based CA system is considered, where a single eNB serves L UEs on J CCs based on OFDMA. Each UE is able to receive data from multiple CCs. The definition for the Physical Resource Block (PRB) that was introduced in [6] is considered in our simulation. While, each CC, frequency resource is divided into S Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs), each PRB configured of K subcarriers in the frequency domain with 15 kHz subcarrier spacing. Therefore, we have a total of 1200 SCs per each CC. As regards to all channels quality on all CCs and feed back to the eNB are estimated same. If we are assumed the total numbers of PRBs on one CC is Sj and the total number of CCs over all the system bandwidth is J, so that, the total available numbers of subcarriers over all the system bandwidth (N) can be formulated as follows .

Scenario # 2

Scenario # 3

Scenario # 4

Scenario # 4

Consequently, the received signal power on the DL transmission for user on subcarrier k of CC m is expressed by the following formula:

101

achieves user throughput gains of 20, 40, 59 and 82 Mbps/cell over scenario #4, 3, 2 and scenario #1 respectively.
User Throughput with CA Technique 1

CDF function for User Throughput

Where Y ,k,m , H ,k,m and N ,k,m denote the DL transmitted signal power, corresponding channel fading weights and the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), respectively. The total transmission power of the eNB, denoted by PTX, is evenly distributed over the whole system bandwidth. Therefore the transmission power on each subcarrier is expressed by the following formula [7].

0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Non-CA CA-2CCs CA-3CCs CA-4CCs CA-5CCs

In this research we assume the transmitted power for each subcarrier is same for all subcarriers. Therefore, according to [8], the cell capacity with consider the effect of frequency reuse factor can be expressed by the following mathematical formula:

20

40

60

80 100 120 140 User Throughput [ Mbps]

160

180

200

Figure 4. CDF of average user throughput with five different scenarios using different Number of CCs.

where, BW is the total system bandwidth in Hz, BWeff is the system bandwidth efficiency, it was introduced in [9], SINR is the achieved SINR, is frequency reuse factor, it is assumed to be one ( =1), which means only 1/th of the spectrum can be used by one cell and SINReff is SINR implementation efficiency [10]. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

User Throughput [Mbps]

The gain of using CA on the system performance in term of throughput and average numbers of active users per cell have been evaluated and investigated under five different deployment scenarios to realize the benefit of using CA in LTE-Advanced system. Figs. 4, 5 and 6 show the simulation result of implementing 4 scenarios types configured by aggregated 2CCs, 3CCs, 4CCs and 5CCs respectively as illustrated in table I and compared with simulation results of scenario#1 that is configured by 1CC Non-CA system. Figs. 4 and 5 illustrate the effect of utilizing CA on the system performance in term of user throughput (b/s/cell), everywhere in the cell. In Fig. 4, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) illustrates the differences between the throughputs per user with five different scenarios. It seems clear that, the user throughput gain by employing CA utilizing 5 CCs is higher than the user throughput gain with CA utilizing 2 CCs, 3 CCs and 4 CCs. Furthermore, the user throughput with CA utilizing 2 CCs, 3 CCs, 4CCs and 5 CCs higher than the user throughput with Non-CA scenario utilizing 1 CC everywhere in the cell. From the result that is illustrated in Fig. 4, the medium user throughput with scenario #5 by aggregated 5 CCs is 94 Mbps/cell. Hence, the medium system throughput for scenarios #4, 3, 2 and scenario #1 are 74 Mbps/cell, 54 Mbps/cell, 35 Mbps/cell and 12 Mbps/cell respectively. As a comparison of profit rate, scenario #5 with aggregated 5 CCs

In other way, Fig. 5 shows the total average throughputs over all the simulation time with five different scenarios. The total average throughput over all the simulation time with aggregated 5 CCs gives higher throughput compared to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th scenarios. The total average throughput over all the simulation time that is results from the simulation is 94 Mbps with utilizing 5 CCs, while, the total average throughput over all the simulation time that are results from the simulation utilizing 4 CCs, 3 CCs and 2 CCs are 74 Mbps , 54 Mbps and 35 Mbps respectively. Furthermore, the total average throughput over all the simulation time that has been resulted from the simulation utilizing 1 CCs is 12 Mbps.
Propobility of User Throughput with CA technique 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1 1CC

2 2CC

3 3CC

4 4CC

5 5CC

Figure 5.

Average user throughput with five different scenarios using different Number of CCs.

Fig. 6 shows the percentage of the active users probability in the cell with utilizing 5 different scenarios. As illustrated in Fig. 6, the active users per cell utilizing 5CCs are much higher than utilizing 1CCs, 2CCs, 3CCs and 4CCs. It is obvious from Fig. 6 that, utilizing scenarios # 5 with 5 CCs obtains higher

102

percentage of the active users probability compared to scenarios 1, 2, 3 and 4 with 1CCs, 2CCs, 3CCs and 4CCs respectively. The percentage achievable gain of the average active users by utilizing scenario # 5 are 62.5%, 47.5%, 32.5%, and 15% higher than utilizing systems type 1, 2, 3 and 4 with 1CCs, 2CCs, 3CCs and 4CCs respectively.
Active Users Propobility each time 0.8 0.7 The Percentage of Active UE/cell x 100% 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

V.

CONCLUSION

A comprehensive overview of Carrier Aggregation techniques and scenarios supporting high-transmission datarate over a wider bandwidth in LTE-Advanced system is highlighted and discussed. A simulation has been developed to evaluate the performance of using carrier aggregation in LTEAdvanced systems. Simulation results prove that, implementing CA with higher numbers of CCs improve system performance in term of average user throughput everywhere in the cell. Furthermore, implementing CA enhance system capacity in term of active users numbers in the cell in LTEAdvanced systems. In the future, the integration between carrier aggregations with AMC technique that potentially enhance the system performance will be investigated in particular during handover from the source to the target eNBs. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This study is sponsored by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) through the university research grant UKM-OUP2012-182.

1 1CC

2 2CC

3 3CC

4 4CC

5 5CC

REFERENCES
[1] M. Iwamura, et al., "Carrier aggregation framework in 3GPP LTEadvanced [WiMAX/LTE Update]," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol. 48, pp. 60-67, 2010. [2] G. Yuan, et al., "Carrier aggregation for LTE-advanced mobile communication systems," Communications Magazine, IEEE, vol. 48, pp. 88-93, 2010. [3] 3GPP, "Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Carrier Aggregation; Base Station (BS) radio transmission and reception (Release 10)," TR 36.808 V1.7.0 2011. [4] I. J. Youngsoo Yuk, Ronny Yong-ho Kim and Kiseon Ryu "Considerations for Carrier Aggregation," 2008. [5] 3GPP, "Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Radio Frequency (RF) system scenarios (Release 10)," 3GPP TR 36.942 V10.2.0 2010. [6] ETSI, "LTE; Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical channels and modulation (3GPP TS 36.211 version 10.3.0 Release 10)," TS 36.211 version 10.3.0, 2011. [7] L. Zhang, et al., "Performance analysis on carrier scheduling schemes in the long-term evolution-advanced system with carrier aggregation," IET communications, vol. 5, p. 612, 2011. [8] Y. Wang, "System Level Analysis of LTE-Advanced: with Emphasis on Multi-Component Carrier Management," Aalborg Universitet, FakultetThe Faculty of Engineering and Science, Department of Electronic Systems, 2010. [9] P. Vieira, et al., "LTE spectral efficiency using spatial multiplexing MIMO for macro-cells," in Signal Processing and Communication Systems, ICSPCS 2008. 2nd International Conference on, 2008, pp. 1-6. [10] D. Martn-Sacristn, et al., "On the way towards fourth-generation mobile: 3GPP LTE and LTE-advanced," EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, vol. 2009, p. 4, 2009.

Figure 6. Average active users per cell with five different scenarios using different Number of CCs.

Therefore, it can be shown from the results of Fig. 6 that, implementing CA with aggregated higher numbers of CCs has been improved system performance in term of capacity. Using CA with 5 CCs allow higher numbers of users to be active and to communicate with the eNB on the same time. Conversely, when the number of CCs is decreased, the number of active users will be decreased. Furthermore, implement CA with J CCs improve the system capacity much better compared to the systems that utilizing Non CA technique. Therefore, we can concluded from all the results in Figs. 4, 5 and 6 that, implementing CA with higher numbers of CCs improve system performance in term of average cell throughput everywhere in the cell and at the same time CA enhancing system capacity compare to scenario # 1 Non CA technique. This is because implement CA with five CCs supporting for wider bandwidth compare to Non CA, which will lid to increase cell throughput and number of active uses per cell in LTE-Advanced system. Consequently, CA with aggregated higher CCs number yields higher throughput compare to scenario # 1 that is utilizing one CC. Finally, for future research we propose to combine carrier aggregation (CA) with Adaptive Modulation and Coding scheme (AMC). The expected result from the proposed model is to improve the system performance in term of spectral efficiency and outage probability in the DL direction of LTEAdvanced system, especially for multimedia services and broadband internet applications during handover from the source to target eNBs. Also, fast and seamless connectivity may be benefit from this model during handover from the source to the target eNBs.

103