QoS-guaranteed data rate allocation for mixed services on licensed and unlicensed bands in LTE and WiFi systems

In face of the exponentially growing demands for various mobile data services, the long term evolution-unlicensed (LTE-U) technology has been proposed to offload over-loaded traffics on the unlicensed spectrum band by leveraging carrier aggregation (CA) technology. However, the quality of service (QoS) requirements of different or mixed services have not been fully considered in existing traffic allocation strategies in terms of various spectrum qualities on both licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands. Therefore, a novel two-step traffic allocation approach is proposed for mixed services to maximize the overall utility of LTE and WiFi systems. And two data rate allocation algorithms for licensed band (DRA-L) and unlicensed band (DRA-UL) are designed based on theoretical analysis. Simulation results verify the enhanced network utility performance of the proposed algorithms compared to the conventional stand-alone DRA-L algorithm.