Carrier Aggregation for Improved Rate versus Power trade-off in Massive MIMO Systems

This work considers a multi-cell, multi-carrier massive MIMO network with carrier aggregation, and tackles the rate versus power consumption trade-off, by jointly optimizing the number of employed component carriers, active antennas, base station density, and transmit power. A provably convergent algorithm is developed together with closed-form results for the individual optimization of the considered resources. Numerical results show how carrier aggregation can effectively reduce the power consumption without sacrificing the rate performance.