Abstract
The explosive growth of mobile Internet-based applications and ecosystems has been driving insatiable demands for data transmission speed. From third generation to fourth generation, the typical data rate of cellular networks has been significantly enhanced from a megabits-per-second to almost a gigabits-per-second level [1]. According to Shannon?s communication theory, an increase of frequency bandwidth plays the key role in expanding channel capacity. However, the highly scattered allocation of long-term evolution (LTE) bands does not support contiguous expansion of bandwidth and acts as the major barrier to further channel capacity enhancement. Therefore, the LTE Advanced standard proposed the concept of carrier aggregation (CA) for the first time, as illustrated in Figure 1(a) [2]. This enables concurrent operation of multiple spectral resources such that the channel bandwidth can be effectively multiplied without increasing the signal-to-noise ratio across the entire channel [3].
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