Spectrum Aggregation: Overview and Challenges

Spectrum aggregation has recently received much attention due to the quick increasing services. This technique makes it possible that multiple spectrum bands are ultilized by the same user to satisfy the large bandwidth demand of the service and achieve better performance. This paper provides an overview on spectrum aggregation. The important research progresses on spectrum aggregation for LTE-Advanced and dynamic spectrum access are briefly described respectively. Finally, some research challenges of protocols and algorithms are addressed for future studies.