LTE-Advanced is the evolutionary path from LTE Release 8. It is designed to significantly enhance the performance of LTE Release 8 in terms of higher peak data rates, improved system capacity and coverage, and lower latency. These enhancements allow LTE-Advanced to meet or exceed the IMT-Advanced requirements and are being considered as part of LTE Release 10. In this paper, some of the physical layer enhancement techniques for LTE-Advanced have been studied including carrier aggregation (CA), uplink multi-cluster scheduling, and uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) with non-overlapping allocations. A system-level simulation was conducted to investigate the performance gains that can be achieved in uplink CA with multi-cluster scheduling and MU-MIMO. Simulation results show that with proper differentiation between power-limited and non-power-limited LTE-A users, multi-cluster scheduling with CA has similar coverage performance as in Rel'8, but can achieve substantial gains in average user throughput compared with Rel'8. MU-MIMO can further improve the throughput performance, especially when MU-MIMO is combined with multi-cluster scheduling.
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