A resource block organization strategy for scheduling in carrier aggregated systems

Abstract

Carrier aggregation (CA) is a promising technology that will allow IMT-Advanced system candidates to achieve spectrum bandwidths of up to 100 MHz using available system resource blocks (RB), even if these are fragmented. Implementation of CA functionality is managed through the use of schedulers capable of assigning multiple RBs to a user. When each available RB is handled individually, the delay from assigning multiple RBs to each user can affect the quality of service (QoS). In this article we develop an efficient scheduling strategy to reduce spectrum resource assignment delay in systems that make use of CA. This strategy is based on an a-priory organization of available RBs in sets. Two different RB Organization Algorithms are compared. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy numerical simulation was performed using a Round Robin scheduler for the downlink of a macro-cellular environment. Results show that using the proposed strategy it is possible to reduce the delay required to assign resources to users without affecting the downlink user capacity when compared to block by block scheduling strategies proposed in literature. The benefits of using the proposed strategy are discussed as well as improvement opportunities.