LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced

5.1 Introduction

This chapter presents the LTE uplink carrier aggregation principles. The uplink carrier aggregation is also part of the Release 10 LTE specifications, similar to the downlink carrier aggregation. First, the key principles of uplink carrier aggregation are introduced. This chapter then proceeds to the detailed impact on the protocols, procedures and physical layer. This chapter also covers physical layer changes in the uplink in the resource usage within a single carrier in Release 10 with the introduction of uplink multi-cluster scheduling. This chapter finally concludes with the uplink carrier aggregation performance investigation and the expected implementation impacts and challenges with the different uplink band combinations.