Chapter 28
Carrier Aggregation
28.1 Introduction
As discussed in Chapter 27, LTE-Advanced aims to support peak data rates of 1 Gbps in the downlink and 500 Mbps in the uplink [1]. In order to fulfil such requirements, a transmission bandwidth of up to 100 MHz is required; however, since the availability of such large portions of contiguous spectrum is rare in practice, LTE-Advanced uses carrier aggregation of multiple Component Carriers (CCs) to achieve high-bandwidth transmission. Release 8 LTE carriers have a maximum bandwidth of 20 MHz, so LTE-Advanced supports aggregation of up to five 20 MHz CCs.
A second motivation for carrier aggregation is to facilitate efficient use of fragmented spectrum, irrespective of the peak data rate. Carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced is designed to support aggregation of a variety of different arrangements of CCs, including CCs of the same or different bandwidths, adjacent or non-adjacent CCs in the same frequency band, and CCs in different frequency bands. Each CC can take any of the transmission bandwidths supported by LTE Release 8, namely 6, 15, 25, 50, 75 or 100 Resource Blocks (RBs), corresponding to channel bandwidths of 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz respectively. For Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) operation, the number of aggregated carriers in uplink and downlink may be different (although Release 10 focuses on the case where the number of downlink CCs is not less than the number of uplink CCs).
