Unlicensed Band Allocation for Heterogeneous Networks

Based on the License Assisted Access (LAA) small cell architecture, the LAA coexisting with Wi-Fi heterogeneous networks provide LTE mobile users with high bandwidth efficiency as the unlicensed channels are shared among LAA and Wi-Fi. However, the LAA and Wi-Fi will affect each other when both systems are using the same unlicensed channel in the heterogeneous networks. In such a network, unlicensed band allocation for LAA and Wi-Fi is an important issue that may affect the quality of service (QoS) of both systems significantly. In this paper, we propose an analytical model and conduct simulation experiments to study two allocations for the unlicensed band: unlicensed full allocation (UFA), unlicensed time-division allocation (UTA), and the corresponding buffering mechanism for the LAA data packets. We evaluate the performance for these unlicensed band allocations schemes in terms of the acceptance rate of both LAA and Wi-Fi packet data in LAA buffer queue. Our study provides guidelines for designing channel occupation phase and the buffer size of LAA small cell.