The Useful Impact of Carrier Aggregation: A Measurement Study in South Korea for Commercial LTE-Advanced Networks

Carrier aggregation (CA) is one of the main features of the long-term evolution (LTE)-Advanced network that was introduced in Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 10 (Rel-10). CA was applied to commercial cellular networks in South Korea in the middle of 2013; however, the performance of CA in commercial networks has not yet been well studied. This article describes how CA technology is applied to a commercial network and how it performs. An extensive field drive test was conducted to compare CA technology performance with that of non-CA technology by using commercial evolved node B (eNB) and user equipment (UE) in a dense urban area and a suburban area. Downlink (DL) CA with two component carriers (CCs) of 30-MHz aggregated bandwidth (BW) was used in the network with one CC of 20-MHz BW at Band 7 and the other with 10-MHz BW at Band 5. The measurement results verified that the maximum DL data rate of CA reached 203 Mb/s, close to the theoretical peak bit rate of 225 Mb/s, and the average DL data rate was 76 Mb/s during the suburban drive test. As a comparison, the maximum DL data rate of single-carrier Band 7 was 141 Mb/s, and the average DL data rate was 51 Mb/s in the same area.