Delivering Fairness and QoS Guarantees for LTE/Wi-Fi Coexistence Under LAA Operation

Licensed assisted access (LAA) enables the coexistence of long-term evolution (LTE) and WiFi in unlicensed bands, while potentially offering improved coverage and data rates. However, cooperation with the conventional random-access protocols that employ listen-before-talk (LBT) considerations makes meeting the LTE performance requirements difficult, since delay and throughput guarantees should be delivered. In this paper, we propose a novel channel sharing mechanism for the LAA system that is capable of simultaneously providing the fairness of resource allocation across the competing LTE and Wi-Fi sessions as well as satisfying the quality-of-service guarantees of the LTE sessions in terms of their upper delay bound and throughput. Our proposal is based on two key mechanisms: 1) LAA connection admission control for the LTE sessions and 2) adaptive duty cycle resource division. The only external information necessary for the intended operation is the current number of active Wi-Fi sessions inferred by monitoring the shared channel. In the proposed scheme, LAA-enabled LTE base station fully controls the shared environment by dynamically adjusting the time allocations for both Wi-Fi and LTE technologies, while only admitting those LTE connections that should not interfere with Wi-Fi more than another Wi-Fi access point operating on the same channel would. To characterize the key performance trade-offs pertaining to the proposed operation, we develop a new analytical model. We then comprehensively investigate the performance of the developed channel sharing mechanism by confirming that it allows to achieve a high degree of fairness between the LTE and Wi-Fi connections as well as provides guarantees in terms of upper delay bound and throughput for the admitted LTE sessions. We also demonstrate that our scheme outperforms a typical LBT-based LAA implementation.