Issues of carrier aggregation intermodulation distortions in LTE-Advanced System

Increasing transmission speed has always been the target for any telecommunication system. For that purpose, LTE-Advanced adopted components carrier aggregation. Up to 5 components carrier can be aggregated (in 3GPP Release 10), and with 20 Mhz bandwith for each component, a total bandwith of 100 Mhz can be reached. 3GPP Release 13 will allow up to 32 components carrier aggregation. On the other hand, power amplifier’s high efficiency is only possible in the nonlinear operation mode. But carrier aggregated signal amplification in that mode leads to intermodulation products. This paper focuses on intermodulation of carrier aggregated components.