Enhanced Carrier Aggregation to support 5G use cases

The most reliable forecasts about the future of mobile communications are those referring to growing demand of mobile data. Carrier Aggregation (CA) is a relevant key enabler technology for present LTE, LTE-Advanced and for future 5G. By combining a number of separate fragmented spectral frequency bands, mobile operators have acquired the possibility to create larger virtual carrier bands to deliver quality content and services at higher transfer rates. The first commercial implementation has aggregated a total of 20 MHz in 800 MHz and 1800 MHz frequency bands achieving a transfer rate of 150Mbps on downlink. Even if, in lab environment throughput rates up to 1.35 Gbps have been achieved, there it is still required to reach the full potential of five compatible aggregated carriers, i.e. gaining 100 MHz overall bandwidth. However, existing works are not specifically addressing the real life end-user benefits. The current work is addressing, beside the theoretical impact of CA technology, real networks specific configurations, implementation and techniques that are supporting the next coming high throughput rates 5G use cases. A performance improvement approach using collected real data is consequently developed to bring real quality of experience (QoE) closer to theoretical expectations, i.e. to improve current technology and to be prepared for 5G migration. According to the captured data, the developed real live extended band LTE-CA approach enables user throughput rates closer to theoretical limits.