Spectrum Aggregation: Initial outcomes from SAMURAI project

Multi-user MIMO and Spectrum Aggregation (also referred to Carrier Aggregation) are two key enablers of next generation wireless systems. Although those techniques were already quite well investigated at theoretical level, their practical implementation is not immediate and raises numerous challenges. The SAMURAI project aims at investigating such challenges as well as at providing realistic performance results. This paper presents first outcomes of the project, with a specific focus of Carrier Aggregation (CA). Two aspects are discussed: CA at PHY/RF level with implementation challenges. Then, the system aspect of CA, providing new flexibility in terms of radio resource management is investigated. System simulations show capacity improvement when CA is enabled. SAMURAI outcomes in the MU-MIMO aspects are reported in a companion paper [9].