LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation for Enhancement of Bandwidth

Abstract

The advancement in technology and smart gadgets have led to the demand for more data and higher data rates. Despite efficient use of spectrum, it is not able to achieve the data rate of 1 Gbps as required by Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A). To achieve such a high data rate, this requires a higher transmission bandwidth which cannot be achieved by a single carrier. So, a new technique is introduced called carrier aggregation to aggregate two or more component carriers to achieve higher bandwidth. The carriers that are to be aggregated can be from continuous spectrum and can also be from different bands which result in three types of carrier aggregation, i.e., intra-band contiguous, intra-band noncontiguous, and inter-band carrier aggregation. The most important feature to move from LTE to LTE-A is carrier aggregation and the main advantage of this is that it is backward compatible. As per 3GPP release it is given that up to five component carriers can be aggregated to achieve a bandwidth of 100 MHz. Thus, in this paper the carrier aggregation up to three-component carriers by taking different number of downlink resource block for each aggregated carrier and comparative study of increment in the bandwidth will be carried out and the simulation results the enhancement of bandwidth using carrier aggregation.