Capacity evaluation of Carrier Aggregation techniques in LTE-Advanced system

In Long Term Evaluation (LTE)-Advanced system, Carrier Aggregation (CA) technique that provide substantial enhancement in data rate transmission for downlink and uplink over wider bandwidth have been proposed. The basic idea of CA technique is to aggregate several smaller contiguous or noncontiguous components, thus concurrent radio resources across multiple carriers are utilized. This paper overview CA technique including data aggregation schemes, bandwidth structure, and CA implementation in LTE-Advanced systems. A simulation model for LTE-Advanced in the downlink has been developed to investigate the impact of CA using up to five Component Carriers (CCs) on the system performance in terms of average throughput and number of active users per cell with respect to non-CA. Simulation show that CA improves the system performance in term of average user throughput within the cell coverage area as CCs increases. Furthermore, CA implementation can enhance the system capacity in term of number of active users in each cell.