Modern wireless communication devices continue to evolve to offer an ever increasing array of capabilities, and are now virtually ubiquitously used by consumers to access a variety of data intensive services via wireless networks. The resulting increased demand on networks to support data intensive services for a rapidly increasing number of devices has placed a demand on network operators to offer upgraded networks capable of supporting both increased data capacity and faster data rates. As such, efforts continue to be made to develop advanced radio access technologies (RATs) to provide higher throughput for data transmitted via wireless networks to support the demand for data services from modern wireless communication devices. For example, some modern cellular RATs, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) Release 10 and beyond, also referred to as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), support a technique known as carrier aggregation, in which bandwidth can be extended through the aggregation of multiple component carriers (CC). In this regard, rather than using a single carrier to support communication between a device and the network, carrier aggregation uses multiple CCs in parallel such that bandwidth for data transmissions to and/or from a wireless communication device can be increased through the aggregation of multiple CCs for conveying data transmissions.
In LTE-A systems, each CC is backward compatible with the LTE Release 8 carrier structure. Carrier aggregation can be supported through the use of both contiguous and non-contiguous spectrums. In this regard, CCs used for carrier aggregation can utilize adjacent frequency bands, or can utilize non-adjacent frequency bands.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds