CARRIER AGGREGATION WITH UPLINK CARRIER SELECTION

Aspects relate to carrier aggregation. Selection of an uplink component carrier for carrier aggregation may be flexible in the sense that the frequency band of the uplink component carrier need not be one of the frequency bands allocated for the downlink component carriers. Thus, in some aspects, an uplink component carrier may be decoupled from (e.g., independent of) the downlink carriers. A decision of whether to implement flexible uplink component carrier selection may be based on network traffic (e.g., particular traffic use cases). As one example, the data throughput requirement for downlink traffic may be relatively high, but the component carriers selected for the downlink traffic to provide this throughput might not provide a desired level of service for the uplink traffic. Thus, one or more component carrier bands selected for the uplink traffic may be different from any of the component carrier bands selected for the downlink traffic.