Experimental analysis of efficacy of carrier aggregation

Abstract

Abstract3GPP introduced carrier aggregation (CA) in Release‐10 to mitigate the increasing bandwidth demand of users. The efficacy of CA in meeting user demand for higher throughput in real‐life scenarios is an important consideration. This letter undertakes a simulation route using NS3 to understand the impact of variations in specific parameter values on the performance of CA in 3GPP‐specified scenarios. This work further establishes an empirical relation between throughput and some varying parameters. The work also shows that maintaining steady cell throughput in a densely populated cell comes at the cost of an individual user throughput. Simulation results exhibit that optimal CA design by tuning physical layer parameters alone cannot provide sustained throughput to the users.