Coexistence of wi-fi and LAA-LTE in unlicensed spectrum

Abstract

The global mobile data usage has grown nearly 70\% annually in recent years. The huge mobile data usage requirement drives the mobile industry to brace the formidable challenge and invent next-generation mobile technologies. LTE, as a successful cellular technology, has gained tremendous importance in recent years due to its high data-rates and improved data access method for mobile devices. Even though LTE still may not be able to meet the mobile data challenge due to current spectrum scarcity in licensed bands. Thus, cellular network faces serious challenges to provide high performance mobile service to end users in the near future.

In order to sustain the possible increase in mobile capacity demand, utilizing the unlicensed band as a supplementary band for LTE is being considered as a promising solution to expand the capacity of mobile systems. Based on the innovation of carrier aggregation, 3GPP has approved a study item on LAA-LTE, which will assist LTE by offloading mobile data in unlicensed band. Thus, LAA-LTE will operate in the spectrum that overlaps with WiFi, which is another popular unlicensed band technology. The concern is that LAA-LTE and WiFi are unlikely to have mechanisms to directly coordinate with each other, considering different core networks, backhauls and deployment plans of LAA-LTE and WiFi networks.

The overarching goal of my research is to investigate the following two aspects: 1) Investigate how LTE will impact on WiFi using experimental analysis when both of them share the same channel, 2) Develop a possible coexistence algorithm to trigger the coexistence between LAA-LTE and WiFi in unlicensed band.