Risk-Informed Interference Assessment for Shared Spectrum Bands: A Wi-Fi/LTE Coexistence Case Study

Interference evaluation is crucial when deciding whether and how wireless technologies should operate. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefit of risk-informed interference assessment to aid spectrum regulators in making decisions, and to readily convey engineering insight. We apply, for the first time, risk assessment to an open question of inter-technology spectrum sharing, i.e., a Wi-Fi/LTE coexistence study in the unlicensed band, and we demonstrate that this method comprehensively quantifies the interference impact. We perform simulations with our newly publicly available tool and we consider throughput degradation and fairness as example metrics to assess the risk for different network densities, numbers of channels, and deployments. The risk assessment study shows that no regulatory intervention is needed to ensure harmonious technical Wi-Fi/LTE coexistence: for the typically large number of channels available in the 5 GHz band, the risk for Wi-Fi from LTE is negligible. As an engineering insight, Wi-Fi coexists better with itself in dense deployments, but better with LTE in sparse deployments. Also, both main LTE-in-unlicensed variants coexist well with Wi-Fi in general. For LTE intra-technology inter-operator coexistence, both variants typically coexist well in the 5 GHz band, but for dense deployments, implementing listen-before-talk causes less interference.