Measurement Study on Carrier Aggregation Implementation in LTE-Advanced Network

Abstract

The increase in demand of high-speed mobile internet has become a significant challenge towards mobile telecommunication service provider. The evolution from 3G to 4G mobile communication has shown a great improvement to cater the problem. However, in these days of data hunger application, 4G need to evolve to another level to be able to support it in the future. The introduction of LTE-Advance has become the cornerstone towards future mobile communications. In this paper, one of the features of LTE-Advance which is Carrier Aggregation (CA) is discussed. CA function by combining multiple carrier band to increase bandwidth so that the data rates throughput can be increase. The measurement was taken in USJ area which has high number of CA enable collocated base stations. The performance of CA is then compared with non-CA cases which is single band. It shows that CA results higher throughput compared to single band. However, when combining two single band throughputs, it results in higher data rates compared to CA throughput. This is due to lacking in P-Cell and S-Cell cooperation. Overall, LTE-Advance CA performance has significantly improved traditional LTE.