84 research outputs found
Risk-Informed Interference Assessment for Shared Spectrum Bands: A Wi-Fi/LTE Coexistence Case Study
Interference evaluation is crucial when deciding whether and how wireless
technologies should operate. In this paper we demonstrate the benefit of
risk-informed interference assessment to aid spectrum regulators in making
decisions, and to readily convey engineering insight. Our contributions are: we
apply, for the first time, risk assessment to a problem of inter-technology
spectrum sharing, i.e. Wi-Fi/LTE in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, and we
demonstrate that this method comprehensively quantifies the interference
impact. We perform simulations with our newly publicly-available tool and we
consider throughput degradation and fairness metrics to assess the risk for
different network densities, numbers of channels, and deployment scenarios. Our
results show that no regulatory intervention is needed to ensure harmonious
technical Wi-Fi/LTE coexistence: for the typically large number of channels
available in the 5 GHz band, the risk for Wi-Fi from LTE is negligible,
rendering policy and engineering concerns largely moot. As an engineering
insight, Wi-Fi coexists better with itself in dense, but better with LTE, in
sparse deployments. Also, both main LTE-in-unlicensed variants coexist well
with Wi-Fi in general. For LTE intra-technology inter-operator coexistence,
both variants typically coexist well in the 5 GHz band, but for dense
deployments, implementing listen-before-talk causes less interference
Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence
Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to
be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple
technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also
result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be
managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum
sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple
technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall.
Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only
due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model
constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless
inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates
in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We
thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of
parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature
review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies
with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii)
secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons.
Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum
sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for
future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design
challenges and suggest future research directions
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