Licensed-Assisted Access for LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum: A MAC Protocol Design

TLDR

Licensed‑assisted access (LAA) aggregates licensed and unlicensed spectrum to boost capacity, but its MAC protocol must coexist fairly with incumbent WiFi users. This work designs a listen‑before‑talk MAC for an LTE‑based LAA system operating in the WiFi unlicensed band. By modeling WiFi throughput and delay, the authors formulate constraints on LAA‑LTE transmission time under both known and unknown WiFi network sizes. The resulting feasible transmission‑time region is optimized for maximum LAA‑LTE or joint throughput, and simulations confirm the design, offering practical guidelines for harmonious coexistence.

Abstract

Licensed-assisted access (LAA), which conveys data information via both licensed and unlicensed bands through spectrum aggregation, becomes a promising solution to enhance the capacity of wireless systems. In view of the potential impact on the incumbent system operating in unlicensed bands, the medium access control (MAC) protocol design for LAA system to harmonically coexist with its neighboring incumbent users is one of the most critical and challenging issues. In this paper, we consider a long-term evolution-based LAA (LAA-LTE) system operating in the WiFi unlicensed spectrum, for which the listen-before-talk-based MAC protocol is carefully designed. By quantifying the WiFi throughput and packet delay in the coexisting system, we formulate the constraints of LAA-LTE transmission time to fairly maintain WiFi services. The conditions of known and unknown network size of incumbent WiFi system are each considered separately. Then, the feasible region of LAA-LTE transmission time is determined, and the LAA-LTE protocol is optimized for maximizing the LAA-LTE throughput or the overall throughput contributed by both LAA-LTE and WiFi system. The theoretical analysis is validated via simulation, which also illustrates important observations when LAA-LTE and WiFi systems coexist. This paper offers guidelines to design the LAA-LTE system, paving the way to a controllable, not only harmonious, coexistence of LAA-LTE and WiFi systems in the unlicensed spectrum.