Joint uplink-downlink carrier aggregation scheme in LTE-A

Abstract

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) supports a wide range of applications that continuously demand for more resources in order to satisfy the customers' needs. Starting from release 10, Carrier Aggregation (CA) technology has been embedded in the standard to increase the available resources and thus higher performance is offered to users. The Bidirectional real-time applications where large requirements are imposed on both Uplink (UL) and Downlink (DL) need for special resource allocation mechanisms to guarantee the bidirectional quality. In this paper we propose a novel CA mechanism for UL-DL scenarios, we characterize its performance and all its affecting variables and we obtain the closed form expressions for its quality performance. An upgraded version is also presented whenever multiple bands are available for CA, where the system can select the most suitable band/s for UL and DL. Interesting conclusions are obtained about the presented approach through computer simulations.