A Fair Listen-Before-Talk Algorithm for Coexistence of LTE-U and WLAN

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in operating long-term evolution (LTE) in unlicensed bands (i.e., LTE-U). However, since LTE and wireless local area networks (WLANs) are designed to operate in different bands, they have no coexistence mechanism, which leads to significant performance degradation. In particular, since LTE does not sense channel vacancy prior to transmissions, the LTE interference severely affects the WLAN operation. To address this problem, we propose a fair listen-before-talk (F-LBT) algorithm for coexistence of LTE-U and WLAN in unlicensed bands. F-LBT jointly considers the total system throughput and the fairness between LTE-U and WLAN and then allocates an appropriate idle period for WLAN. Evaluation results demonstrate that F-LBT can improve the total system throughput while providing the fairness between LTE-U and WLAN.