This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Lema, M. A., García-Lozano, M., and Ruiz, S. (2015), Cubic spline extrapolation for uplink channel quality prediction in LTE-A with carrier aggregation. Trans. Emerging Tel. Tech., doi: 10.1002/ett.2950., which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ett.2950/epdf. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

In the context of wireless communications, an accurate channel state information is the key to a correct radio resource management. In the uplink of long-term evolution advanced, obtaining up-to-date channel state information relies on user equipments that send sounding signals throughout the available bandwidth. This procedure is quite challenging when considering the ever increasing bandwidth demands and the introduction of carrier aggregation. Information from many radio resource blocks becomes outdated and unreliable for scheduling operations. Besides, interference values are much more variant than in the downlink due to changes in the position of interferers and their transmission power. This work proposes the introduction of a cubic spline extrapolation method to obtain a prediction horizon that allows extending the reliability of the channel quality evaluation along time. Although very high interference levels and variations thereof imply no gains, the mechanism succeeds with moderate interference, situation that can be provided by interference cancellation strategies.

Peer Reviewed