LTE and WiFi co-existence in 5 GHz unlicensed band

Abstract

Since the future mobile networks will require significantly higher data throughput, and the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) licensed bands are already occupied, the frequency band extension and the data rate increase may be achieved by using some of the available unlicensed bands. The most appropriate unlicensed band for this purpose lies in 5 GHz frequency range. However, this unlicensed band is already occupied by WiFi networks and a special attention has to be paid to coordinate these two different networks in the shared spectrum usage. Therefore, this paper considers the shared access co-existence in 5 GHz unlicensed band between uncoordinated LTE and WiFi networks. More precisely, it considers the influence of the LTE downlink transmission on the performance of the WiFi networks. The experimental results show that the LTE significantly degrades the WiFi network performance, which means that some of the coordination algorithms have to be employed.nema