Learning-based small cell traffic balancing over licensed and unlicensed bands

Abstract Unlicensed spectrum can be utilized by long term evolution (LTE) cellular systems to satisfy high throughput requirements. In this letter, a regret-based learning aided downlink traffic balancing scheme for licensed and unlicensed bands is proposed while ensuring fair coexistence of LTE-unlicensed (LTE-U) and Wi-Fi devices in the same band. It is further improved with the optimization of energy efficiency (EE) for small cell (SC) and macrocell scenarios followed by an inter-SC interference management mechanism with better performance over the existing literature. Compared to the cases with fixed airtime, up to 8%-10% superior results are shown for the scenarios of EE and rate maximization, respectively