Physical Uplink Control Channel Enhancements for Further Evolved LTE-Advanced

Carrier aggregation has enabled LTE to efficiently utilize wide and fragmented spectrum to provide high data rate services to end users´ benefits. We investigate the challenges of providing reliable multi-carrier hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) and timely periodic channel state information (CSI) feedbacks from terminals aggregating multiple component carriers in LTE networks. We consider unified and reliable uplink control channel designs to carry multi-carrier HARQ and periodic CSI feedback messages simultaneously. Care is taken in the designs to reduce the detection complexity on the network side, which also improves its detection reliability relative to existing LTE signalling schemes.