Carrier aggregation across wireless access technologies

Abstract

In order to increase system capacity and improve UE peak throughput, 3GPP has introduced Multi Carrier operation for HSPA by aggregating 2 adjacent carriers in Release 8 and further enhancements in Release 9 by aggregating upto 4 non adjacent carriers. Similar operation was adopted in 3GPP Release 10 for LTE allowing it to aggregate upto 5 carriers. Many Mobile operators are deploying both technologies LTE and HSPA simultaneously and will face great challenges with their assigned frequency spectrum to use aggregation either in LTE or HSPA. Multicarrier LTE or HSPA have quite similar Peak data rates results when using the same bandwidth. This paper proposes the possibility of aggregating LTE and HSPA carriers in a multi radio environment allowing dynamic usage of both systems by a single user for capacity and peak data rates improvements.Mobile operatorsfrequency spectrummulti radio environment