Harmonious Coexistence and Efficient Spectrum Sharing for LTE-U and Wi-Fi

Extending LTE to unlicensed bands (LTE-U) is gaining increasing interest recently. However, its success faces great challenges due to the inherent lack of compatibility between LTE and Wi-Fi. In this paper, we address the problem of harmonious coexistence and efficient spectrum sharing for LTE-U and Wi-Fi. We develop an analysis framework for the Carrier Sensing Adaptive Transmission (CSAT) mechanism, which leads to a Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) enhanced CSAT scheme that achieves capacity gains for both LTE-U and Wi-Fi, and provides useful guidelines on achieving fairness. For efficient spectrum sharing among LTE-U Pico Evolved NodeBs (PeNBs), we propose an Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) based spectrum share mechanism incorporated into a spectrum auction framework. Both the analysis and the superior performance of the proposed scheme are validated with simulations and comparison with several benchmarks.