Long Term Evolution – License Assisted Access (LTE-LAA): Modeling and Coexistence Performance Analysis

Wireless communication built upon radio spectrum plays an instrumental role in today's modern world. With the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, mobile cellular networks need more spectrum to boost their system capacity. Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology leveraging the unlicensed band is anticipated to provide a solution to address this challenge. However, ensuring fair operation in terms of spectrum sharing with current unlicensed spectrum incumbents remains a key challenge for the success and viability of Unlicensed LTE (U-LTE). In particular, fair co-existence between unlicensed LTE and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11x standard, known as Wi-Fi, remains a principal concern, due to the ubiquitous, high-throughput and high capacity nature of both technologies. This work addresses the problem of modeling and evaluating the coexistence of LTE License-Assisted-Access (LTE-LAA) in the unlicensed band. The research work presents a novel analytical model using Markov Chain to accurately model the LAA Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) scheme, as specified in the final technical specification 36.213 of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 13 and 14. Model validation is demonstrated through numerical and simulation result comparison. Model performance evaluation is examined and contrasted with the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) and analysis results are subsequently presented and discussed herein. Finally, succeeding model development, a comprehensive coexistence performance analysis study is developed and completed examining the coexistence of homogeneous and heterogeneous network scenarios consisting of LTE-LAA and Wi-Fi nodes. As a result, the contribution of this work establishes a novel apparatus that facilitates numerical analysis of the LTE-LAA LBT mechanism and enables numerical comparison of future enhancements with the standardized LTE-LAA framework. In addition, this work delivers a delineating, unequivocal and in-depth examination of the effects and implications that the LTE-LAA LBT mechanism and its parameters have on coexistence performance of homogeneous and heterogeneous co-channel and co-located networks

Enhancing Coexistence in the Unlicensed Band with Massive MIMO

We consider cellular base stations (BSs) equipped with a large number of antennas and operating in the unlicensed band. We denote such system as massive MIMO unlicensed (mMIMO-U). We design the key procedures required to guarantee coexistence between a cellular BS and nearby Wi-Fi devices. These include: neighboring Wi-Fi channel covariance estimation, allocation of spatial degrees of freedom for interference suppression, and enhanced channel sensing and data transmission phases. We evaluate the performance of the so-designed mMIMO-U, showing that it allows simultaneous cellular and Wi-Fi transmissions by keeping their mutual interference below the regulatory threshold. The same is not true for conventional listen-before-talk (LBT) operations. As a result, mMIMO-U boosts the aggregate cellular-plus-Wi-Fi data rate in the unlicensed band with respect to conventional LBT, exhibiting increasing gains as the number of BS antennas grows.Comment: To appear in Proc. IEEE ICC 201

비면허대역 셀룰라 통신을 위한 성능 향상 기법

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2021.8. 박세웅.The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has standardized long-term evolution (LTE) licensed-assisted access (LTE-LAA) that uses a wide unlicensed band as an alternative solution to the insufficient bandwidth problem of the existing LTE. 3GPP cellular communications in unlicensed spectrum allow transmission only after completing listen-before-talk (LBT) operation. For downlink, the LBT operation helps cellular traffic to coexist well with Wi-Fi traffic. However, cellular uplink transmission is attempted only at the time specifically determined by the base station after having a successful LBT and the user equipment (UE) may suffer transmission failure and delayed transmission due to Wi-Fi interference. As a result, cellular uplink traffic does not coexist well with Wi-Fi traffic. NR-U suffers from the collision issue because its channel access mechanism is similar to that of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi solves the collision problem through the request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) mechanism. However, NR-U has no way of solving the collision problem. As a result, NR-U suffers severe performance degradation due to collisions as the number of contending nodes increases. In this dissertation, we consider the following two enhancements to cellular communication in the unlicensed spectrum: (i) Uplink channel access enhancement for solving poor uplink performance and (ii) collision minimization for efficient channel utilization. First, we mathematically analyze the problem of unfairness between cellular and Wi-Fi for uplink channel access. To address the coexistence problem in unlicensed spectrum, we propose a standard-compliant approach, termed UpChance, which allows the UE to use a minimum length of uplink reservation signal (RS) and the base station to determine the optimal timing for the UE's uplink transmission. Through ns-3 simulation, we verify that UpChance improves the performance of fairness and random access completion time by up to 88% and 99%, respectively. Second, we propose to extend an RS duration and use a split RS for reservation in NR-U that consists of front RS and rear RS and design a new collision minimization scheme, termed R-SplitC, that contains two components: new split RS operation and contention window size (CWS) control. New split RS operation helps to minimize collisions in NR-U transmissions, and CWS control works to protect the performance of other communication technologies such as Wi-Fi. We mathematically analyze and evaluate the performance of our scheme and confirm that R-SplitC improves network throughput by up to 100.6% compared to the baseline RS scheme without degrading Wi-Fi performance. In summary, we propose standard-compliant uplink channel access enhancement scheme and collision minimization scheme for cellular communication in unlicensed spectrum. Through this research, we achieve enhancements of network performance such as throughput and fairness.3세대 파트너십 프로젝트는 기존 LTE의 부족한 대역폭 문제에 대한 대안으로 넓은 비면허 대역을 사용하는 라이선스 지원 접속을 표준화하고 있다. 비면허 대역에서 3GPP 셀룰러 통신은 LBT 동작을 완료한 후에만 전송을 허용한다. 다운링크의 경우 LBT 작업을 통해 셀룰러 트래픽이 와이파이 트래픽과 잘 공존할 수 있습니다. 그러나, 셀룰러 업링크 전송은 LBT 성공 후 기지국에 의해 특별히 결정된 시간에만 시도되며, 사용자 장비는 와이파이의 간섭으로 인해 전송 실패와 전송 지연을 겪을 확률이 높다. 따라서 셀룰러 업링크 트래픽이 와이파이 트래픽과 잘 공존하지 못한다. 라이선스 지원 접속 기술은 또한 채널 액세스 메커니즘이 와이파이의 채널 액세스 메커니즘과 유사하기 때문에 동시 전송으로 충돌 문제를 겪고 있다. 와이파이는 RTS/CTS 메커니즘을 통해 충돌 문제를 해결한다. 그러나 현재 라이선스 지원 접속 기술은 충돌 문제를 해결할 방법이 존재하지 않는다. 따라서 라이선스 지원 접속 기술은 경합 노드 수가 증가함에 따라 충돌로 인해 심각한 성능 저하를 겪는다. 본 논문에서는 비면허 대역에서 셀룰러 통신에 대한 다음과 같은 두 가지 개선을 고려한다. (i) 업링크 성능 저하를 해결하기 위한 업링크 채널 액세스 향상 및 (ii) 효율적인 채널 활용을 위한 충돌 최소화. 첫째, 업링크 채널 액세스를 위한 셀룰러와 와이파이 사이의 불공정성 문제를 수학적으로 분석한다. 비면허 대역에서의 공존 문제를 해결하기 위해, 우리는 단말이 최소 길이의 업링크 예약 신호를 사용하고 기지국이 단말의 업링크 전송에 대한 최적의 타이밍을 결정할 수 있는 UpChance라는 표준을 만족하는 상향 링크 채널 접근 방식을 제안한다. ns-3 시뮬레이션을 통해 UpChance가 공정성과 랜덤 액세스 완료 시간을 각각 최대 88%, 99% 향상시키는 것을 검증한다. 둘째, 우리는 전방 예약신호와 후방 예약신호로 구성된 분할 예약 신호를 사용하고 경합 창 크기를 추가적으로 제어하는 R-SplitC라는 새로운 충돌 최소화 체계를 제안한다. 새로운 분할 예약 신호는 라이선스 지원 접속 기술의 전송간의 충돌을 최소화하는 데 도움을 주며, 경합 창 크기 제어는 와이파이와 같은 다른 통신 기술의 성능을 보호한다. 우리는 우리 체계의 성능을 수학적으로 분석하고 평가하여 R-SplitC가 와이파이 성능을 저하시키지 않고 기존의 예약 신호 체계에 비해 네트워크 처리량을 최대 100.6% 향상시키는 것을 확인한다. 요약하면, 우리는 비면허 대역에서 셀룰러 통신을 위한 업링크 채널 액세스 향상 기법 및 충돌 최소화 기법을 제안한다. 본 연구를 통해, 우리는 최첨단 기술에 비해 처리량 및 공정성과 같은 네트워크 성능의 향상을 달성한다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Main Contributions 2 1.2.1 Uplink Channel Access Enhancement for Cellular Communication in Unlicensed Spectrum 2 1.2.2 R-SplitC: Collision Minimization for Cellular Communication in Unlicensed Spectrum 3 1.3 Organization of the Dissertation 4 2 Uplink Channel Access Enhancement for Cellular Communication in Unlicensed Spectrum 5 2.1 Introduction 5 2.2 Related Work and Preliminaries 7 2.2.1 Related Work 7 2.2.2 Preliminaries 8 2.3 Mathematical Analysis for Unfairness between Uplink Cellular and Wi-Fi 10 2.3.1 PRACH scenario 10 2.3.2 UL data scenario 13 2.4 Proposed Scheme 17 2.4.1 UE Operation 18 2.4.2 eNB Operation 19 2.5 Performance Evaluation 24 2.5.1 Simulation Environments 24 2.5.2 UL data transmission 25 2.5.3 Random access 27 2.6 Summary 29 3 R-SplitC: Collision Minimization for Cellular Communication in Unlicensed Spectrum 37 3.1 Introduction 37 3.2 Related Work and Preliminaries 39 3.2.1 Related Work 39 3.2.2 NR-U 40 3.2.3 listen-before-talk (LBT) 41 3.2.4 reservation signal and mini-slot 41 3.2.5 Wi-Fi 42 3.3 Proposed Scheme 44 3.3.1 New RS structure 46 3.3.2 CWS control 48 3.4 Performance Analysis 49 3.4.1 Throughput Analysis for R-Split 49 3.4.2 Throughput Analysis for R-SplitC 55 3.5 Performance Evaluation 57 3.5.1 Performance Evaluation for an NR-U only Network 58 3.5.2 Performance Evaluation for an NR-U/Wi-Fi Network 61 3.6 Summary 65 4 Concluding Remarks 67 4.1 Research Contributions 67 4.2Future Work 68 Abstract (In Korean) 75 감사의글 78박

LTE and Wi-Fi Coexistence in Unlicensed Spectrum with Application to Smart Grid: A Review

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is expanding its utilization in unlicensed band by deploying LTE Unlicensed (LTEU) and Licensed Assisted Access LTE (LTE-LAA) technology. Smart Grid can take the advantages of unlicensed bands for achieving two-way communication between smart meters and utility data centers by using LTE-U/LTE-LAA. However, both schemes must co-exist with the incumbent Wi-Fi system. In this paper, several co-existence schemes of Wi-Fi and LTE technology is comprehensively reviewed. The challenges of deploying LTE and Wi-Fi in the same band are clearly addressed based on the papers reviewed. Solution procedures and techniques to resolve the challenging issues are discussed in a short manner. The performance of various network architectures such as listenbefore- talk (LBT) based LTE, carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based Wi-Fi is briefly compared. Finally, an attempt is made to implement these proposed LTEWi- Fi models in smart grid technology.Comment: submitted in 2018 IEEE PES T&

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