Performance of Uplink Carrier Aggregation in LTE-Advanced Systems

Carrier Aggregation (CA) has been proposed to aggregate two or more Component Carriers (CCs) to support a much wider transmission bandwidth for LTE-Advanced systems. With carrier aggregation, it is possible to schedule a User Equipment (UE) on multiple component carriers simultaneously. In this paper, the authors evaluate the performance of uplink CA in LTE-Advanced systems with different CC allocation schemes. They first present the Radio Resource Management (RRM) framework of multi-component carrier LTE-Advanced systems, with special attention on CC selection, adaptive transmission bandwidth, and uplink power control.