Primary Component Carrier Assignment in LTE-A Husnu S. Narman 1 and Mohammed Atiquzzaman 2 1 Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson SC, 29634 USA husnu@ou.edu 2 School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, Norman OK, 73019 USA atiq@ou.edu Abstract. Bandwidth requirement for the mobile data traffic is on the rise be- cause of increasing number of mobile users. To answer the requirement, Carrier Aggregation is proposed. With Carrier Aggregation and MIMO, operators can provide up to 3Gbps download speed. In Carrier Aggregation, several compo- nent carriers from multiple bands are assigned to users. The assigned Compo- nent Carriers are classified as Primary and Secondary Component Carriers. The Primary Component Carrier (PCC) is the main carrier and only updated during the handover and cell reselection, but Secondary Component Carriers (SCC) are auxiliary carriers to boost data rates and can be activated/deactivated anytime. During the carrier assignment operations, PCC reassignment can lead packet in- terruptions because reassignments of PCC to users can lead SCCs reassignment. Several methods have been proposed to increase the efficiency of the carrier as- signment operations. However, none of them shows the system performance if LTE-A can have a procedure which allows one of SCCs to handle the duties of PCC during the PCC reassignment to eliminate packet transfer interruption. Therefore, we have used four different carrier assignment methods to investi- gate the performance of LTE-A with and without the procedure. Results show that distinct carrier assignment methods are differently affected by the procedure. Our results and analysis will help service providers and researchers to develop efficient carrier assignment methods. Key words: LTE, LTE-A, component carrier assignment, resources allocation, analysis. 1 Introduction Data traffic over mobile network is increasing with the rise in the number of mo- bile users. Therefore, new advanced techniques are required to satisfy users. One of the important technology is LTE-A which provides 1.5 Gbps for uplink and 3 Gbps for downlink peak data rates to mobile users by using Carrier Aggregation (CA) and MIMO technology [1]. In CA, several Component Carriers (CC) with 1.5MHz, 3MHz, 5MHz, 10MHz, 15MHz or 20MHz bandwidth from a number of different or same bands are assigned to users. [1]. Therefore, there are three types of Carrier Aggre- gation, and they are Intra-band contiguous, Intra-band non-contiguous and Inter-band non-contiguous [1]. 12th EAI International Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness