QoS-Aware Joint Component Carrier Selection and Resource Allocation for Carrier Aggregation in 5G

Carrier Aggregation (CA) has been a breakthrough in LTE that led to increased throughput for users, and is still one of the key technologies in 5G that helps to enhance spectrum utilization. In CA, Component Carriers (CCs) are dynamically activated and deactivated depending on several performance factors. Optimal selection of CCs has been studied in the literature. However, the latency associated with activation and deactivation of CCs, control channel overhead for switching CCs, as well as the energy consumed for monitoring the active CCs have not been a part of the optimal CC selection problem. Nevertheless, those become stringent design constraints in practice. In this paper, we address optimal CC selection and resource allocation in 5G networks, where the above constraints are considered and the 5G network supports several service types with different 5G QoS Identifiers (5QI). The proposed optimum joint CC selection and Radio Resource Block (RB) allocation schemes maximize average throughput of users and satisfy QoS of users in terms of delay. In addition, the proposed schemes take CC activation and deactivation burden into consideration and aim to minimize the number of activations and deactivations. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solution outperforms the state of the art solution while satisfying the QoS requirements and creating close to 95.5% reduction on the number of CCs activations and deactivations.