5G Component Carrier Management Evaluation by Means of System Level Simulations

This work presents essential aspects of 5G system level simulator for enabling advanced component validations and optimizations. System level simulations in the 5G era, consider demanding use cases with high load and very limited latency in order to cover services such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). As such, appropriate configuration, environment and network models need to be defined in order to proceed to performance evaluation. The system-level simulation platform is a discrete event simulation environment for the simulation of heterogeneous networks which is extended with new features to support the new functionalities of 5G. To show the potential of this simulation tool, in this work, a framework for multi-connectivity management has been integrated and assessed in a load-imbalanced scenario. Simulation results show how a proper assignment of component carriers (CCs) in this situation allows increasing the users’ throughput by up to a 60% when compared to a simple received power scheme for link management.