Efficient Sub-Carrier Allocation Algorithm for OFDM based Wireless Systems

Carrier aggregation is a key functionality for next generation wireless communication systems that enables mobile network operators to create larger "virtualâ" carrier bandwidths for data hungry applications by aggregating available component carriers. In this paper, sub-carrier allocation prob-lem in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based wireless systems with carrier aggregation is studied. A two-step solution including component carrier and sub-carrier allocation is proposed. Per-formance of the proposed solution has been eval-uated using system level simulations and results show clearly that the proposed algorithm outper-forms the highly complex combinatorial algorithm introduced as an optimal solution in terms of cell throughput and user throughput.