Coexistence of Wi-Fi and LAA-LTE: Experimental evaluation, analysis and insights

LTE-A as a cellular technology has gained tremendous importance in recent years due to its high data-rates and improved data access for mobile devices. Recently, utilizing the unlicensed band as a supplementary band for LTE-A is being considered to expand the capacity of mobile systems. License-assisted access using LTE (LAA-LTE) will thus operate in the unlicensed band, and will operate in a spectrum that overlaps with Wi-Fi, another popular unlicensed-band technology. The concern is that LAA-LTE and Wi-Fi are unlikely to have mechanisms to directly coordinate with each other to address channel-sharing issues. In this paper, we study the interference impact of LAA-LTE on Wi-Fi under various network conditions using purely experimental analysis in indoor environments. The following three questions are specifically considered in this paper: (1) What are the implications of LAA-LTE usage on Wi-Fi? (2) How should LAA-LTE or Wi-Fi be configured for Wi-Fi to be less impacted? (3) How should the LAA-LTE MAC protocol be designed to be gracefully co-exist with Wi-Fi? To answer the above questions, we present comprehensive experimental results and give insights based on the results.