Research Article
Towards LTE-Advanced and LTE-A Pro Network Simulations
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/3067665.3067669, author={Biljana Bojovic and Melchiorre Danilo Abrignani and Marco Miozzo and Lorenza Giupponi and Nicola Baldo}, title={Towards LTE-Advanced and LTE-A Pro Network Simulations}, proceedings={Proceedings of the Workshop on ns-3}, publisher={ACM}, proceedings_a={WNS3}, year={2017}, month={7}, keywords={Network Simulator 3 (ns-3) LTE-A Carrier Aggregation}, doi={10.1145/3067665.3067669} }- Biljana Bojovic
Melchiorre Danilo Abrignani
Marco Miozzo
Lorenza Giupponi
Nicola Baldo
Year: 2017
Towards LTE-Advanced and LTE-A Pro Network Simulations
WNS3
ACM
DOI: 10.1145/3067665.3067669
Abstract
Carrier aggregation (CA) technology was introduced in 3GPP spec-ification in Release 10, in 2011, as part of Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) standardization. Most of the operators recog-nized it as the most important technology in LTE-A since it allows to quickly turn investment in additional LTE carriers into higher data rates. This is because CA allows a quick adoption and an efficient usage of fragmented and non-contiguous spectrum. Addi-tionally, CA is a key technology for enabling some of LTE-A Pro technologies which are proposed in Release 13 and 14, such as, aggregation with unlicensed frequencies in the downlink, known as licensed assisted access (LAA), and LAA with aggregation in the uplink, known as enhanced LAA (eLAA). In this paper we describe the CA extension of the LTE module of ns-3 network simulator that we have implemented and contributed to ns-3 community. Firstly, we describe the motivation and technology background. Then, we describe the extension from a technical perspective, highlighting the new application interface being introduced, and the modifi-cations of prior ns-3 LTE model involving the control and data planes of both the user equipment (UE) and evolved node B (eNB) protocol stack. Finally, we provide description of example scenarios and the validation of the carrier aggregation feature providing a performance comparison of the LTE system with and without CA capability.