ABSTRACT
The main goal of this work was testing the performance of Carrier Aggregation (CA) in commercial LTE network and its comparison with the single carrier LTE network, and ensuring that the functionality of LTE-Advanced with CA meets the performance expectations for the commercial network, especially with 256QAM modulation. The aim of this article was to portray how CA technology is applied to the commercial LTE network and analyze its performance. We used CA in the downlink with two Carrier Components (CC) of 35 MHz aggregated bandwidth in the network with one CC of 20 MHz at band 3 (i.e., 1800MHz) and the other of 10 MHz at band 20 (i.e., 800 MHz). The field measurement results achieved the maximum downlink data rate of 215 Mbps in the Near-cell scenario, which is close to the theoretical peak throughput and 92 Mbps in the Far-cell scenario (worst case scenario).
