Performance Evaluation of Carrier Aggregation in LTE-A Pro Mobile Systems

Carrier Aggregation (CA) was introduced by the 3GPP, in its Release 10 i.e., Long Term Evolution - Advanced (LTE-A), to address the peak data rate requirement set by the IMT-Advanced standard. As it enables for quick adoption of the fragmented radio spectrum, it was recognized by the telecommunication operators as a game-changing technology for achieving significantly increased data rates. In this paper, we detail how the implementation of CA with up to five Components Carriers (CCs) impacts the achievable throughput of connected end-users. In the simulation tool Network Simulator 3 (NS-3), the intra-band contiguous CA was implemented for both downlink and uplink channels. In addition, a uniform 2D grid of values that represent the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SINR) in the downlink with respect to the eNodeB (eNB) i.e., Radio Environment Map (REM) was implemented. As the previously published results for the CA contain mostly the data for the downlink channel, the implemented scenario provides new insights related to the uplink channel communication. Also, in the performance evaluation, we illustrate the expected data rates for the 5G New Radio (NR) systems and compare them with the achieved results in the case of 4G CA setup.