The Evaluation of the Throughput Performance of an LTE-Advanced Urban Area Network with the Inter-Band Non-Contiguous Carrier Aggregation Method

Abstract

Data obtained from the drive-test in the urban area (a case study of Siliwangi Stadium, Bandung) revealed that the low throughput occurred on the downlink, which was 3.56 Mbps. On the uplink, it was 20.7 Mbps. Additionally, based on the Operating Support System (OSS) data, the site had high resource block usage (80% of PRB usage). It revealed the high traffic volume in the area, which resulted in poor throughput values received by users. The area is one of the potential market areas in the city of Bandung, which is indicated by housing, military area command education and training regiment, schools, hotels, markets, and stadiums. Based on the Site Database (SDB), it was known that the site has not yet implemented the carrier aggregation method. This study evaluated throughput using the Inter-Band Non-Contiguous Carrier Aggregation method by comparing three scenarios: Non-CA, CA Non-Repeater, and CA Repeater. Based on the results of the non-CA simulation, the downlink throughput increased by 23,582 Mbps, and the uplink throughput by 20.098 Mbps. Meanwhile, in the non-repeater CA simulation, the downlink throughput increased by 44.56% to 34.091 Mbps, and the uplink throughput increased by 39.22% to 27.980 Mbps. Furthermore, the CA Repeater simulation increased downlink throughput by 63.70% to 38.603 Mbps and uplink throughput by 45.06% to 29.154 Mbps.