LTE Transmission in Unlicensed Bands: Evaluating the Impact over Clear Channel Assessment

Among the significant advances in mobile network technology, as evident in the latest 3GPP releases, one of the most notable is the possibility to do aggregation between licensed and unlicensed carriers. With LTE transmitting over unlicensed bands, obvious concerns of a fair co- existence with other preexisting technologies have risen up. In this study, we aim to evaluate the impact of LTE transmission on the key mechanism of Clear Channel Assessment (CCA), which is common to several unlicensed systems, amongst which Wi-Fi is the most notable. Relying on the statistical tool of stochastic geometry and a semianalytical approach, we will obtain the probabilities of Wi-Fi preamble false alarm and detection under a wide set of realistic propagation effects, such as path-loss and Rayleigh distributed fading. Above all, we will model the effect of a single LTE downlink interfering transmission, as well as the aggregate interference effect. Hence, we shall be able to evaluate the modified energy detection threshold that has been long debated between 3GPP and IEEE 802.11 Working Groups.