UE current consumption on carrier aggregation in LTE-A systems

Carrier Aggregation (CA) is one of the main features of LTE-Advanced that improves data rates by allowing the User Equipment (UE) to receive data on more than one Component Carrier (CC). The CA framework was used as the basis for other important 3GPP features like LAA (Licensed Assisted Access) and EN-DC (E-UTRAN New Radio NR - Dual Connectivity). This paper presents some real current measurements of a recently launched smartphone in intra and inter-band CA combinations up to 3 CCs. The experimental results show that 2 CCs of 10+10 MHz consumes 15% more energy during transmission than a scenario without CA with the same bandwidth. The energy consumption for inter and intra-band scenarios remains almost the same. It is higher for 3 than 2 CCs in about 7%. Measurements presented on this paper differ in 61% in some scenarios when compared with a work from 2012 and a device 6 generations older.