Small Cell Enhancements In LTE-Advanced System

The rapid development of mobile internet and smart phones has brought explosive growth in diverse data applications over cellular networks. The great increase in mobile data services lead to rapid UE battery consumption, thus restricting users’s QoE. Compared to the traditional methods of capacity expansion by splitting macrocells, Small Cell enhancement technology is considered as the more cost-effective and flexible solution. This thesis focuses on energy saving mechanisms of the UE side in HetNet on the Small Cell enhancement related technologies.Firstly, the targets and requirements of the Small Cell enhancement technology needs and goals are analyzed, and the inter-site carrier aggregation is introduced to achieve the target goals and requirements. Secondly, power saving mechanisms of discontinuous reception (DRX) in LTE is presented to reduce the UE’s redundant active time effectively. Besides, the new DRX mechanism for control/user-plane split under above mentioned new system framework is designed. Thirdly, according to3GPP RAN1aggrements, since the configuration of Small Cell discovery signal doesn’t match the current specification for UE measurement time, some solutions are proposed to resolve these problems about inter-frequency and intra-frequency Small Cell measurement. The simulation results show that these solutions can decrease UE’s battery consumption.