LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is the project name of the evolved version of LTE developed by 3GPP as part of the 3GPP technical specifications 36.211, 36.212, and 36.213.
The information presented here is subject to change. The requirements for LTE-Advanced are defined in 3GPP Technical Report (TR) 36.913. These requirements are based on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) requirements for 4G and on 3GPP operators' own requirements for advancing LTE.
In previous releases, LTE supports channel bandwidths up to 20 MHz. LTE-A provides wider bandwidths through the aggregation of contiguous and non-contiguous component carriers in order to achieve significantly higher data rates and increased channel bandwidth.
Contiguous aggregation allows two 20 MHz channels to be located side by side and can be supported with a single transceiver. An LTE-Advance UE with capabilities for receive and/or transmit aggregation is able to simultaneously receive and/or transmit on multiple component carriers.
Component carriers must be compatible with LTE release 8 and 9.
In release 10, the maximum size of a single component carrier is limited to 110 resource blocks, although for reasons of simplicity and backward capability, it is unlikely that anything beyond the current 100 RB will be specified.
Up to 5 component carriers may be aggregated.
An LTE-Advanced UE cannot be configured with more uplink component carriers than downlink component carriers, and in typical TDD deployments, the number of uplink and downlink component carriers, as well as the bandwidth of each, must be the same.
LTE-Advanced enhances the uplink multiple access scheme by adopting clustered SC-FDMA. also known as discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM (DFT-S-OFDM). This scheme is similar to SC-FDMA but has the advantage that it allows non-contiguous (clustered) groups of subcarriers to be allocated for transmission by a single UE, such as simultaneous PUCCH/PUSCH transmission.