Evolved Carrier Aggregation: CDMA2000 and LTE
One advanced feature of 3GPP LTE-Advanced is carrier aggregation. It is an essential mechanism for LTE Release 10/11 to meet the peak-data rate, 1Gbps, requirement of IMT-Advanced of ITU-R. Beside this, it also helps LTE maintain backward compatibility, support symmetric/asymmetric operation modes and contiguous/non-contiguous aggregations. All these features help enable a variety of network deployment scenarios, such as hot-spot operations and flexible duplex. Historically carrier aggregation is not something brand-new in standards. On 3GPP2 side, the IS-2000 standard supports a multi-carrier operation, Spreading Rate 3 or 3x. Spreading 3 is used when higher data rates are desired with more bandwidth available. Spreading 3 of multi-carrier operation can make IS-2000 not only is backward compatible with its IS-95 predecessor but also satisfies the requirements set forth by IMT-2000/3G at that time. With adding additional guard band, IS-2000 can...