A system described herein may provide a technique for performing carrier aggregation in a wireless telecommunications network in a manner that accounts for (a) diverse licenses for different carriers across different regions, (b) network considerations in minimizing the number of times carrier aggregation is performed, and (c) user equipment (“UE”) considerations in maximizing battery life by utilizing only the carriers that are necessary to utilize. A smallest carrier (or group of carriers) may be identified as a default carriers, and other carriers or groups of carriers may be ranked in descending order, according to size. The ranked list may be iteratively used when performing carrier aggregation, in which the largest available carrier (or group of carriers) from the list may be used for carrier aggregation.