Proponents of deploying LTE in the 5 GHz band for providing additional
cellular network capacity have claimed that LTE would be a better neighbour to
Wi-Fi in the unlicensed band, than Wi-Fi is to itself. On the other side of the
debate, the Wi-Fi community has objected that LTE would be highly detrimental
to Wi-Fi network performance. However, there is a lack of transparent and
systematic engineering evidence supporting the contradicting claims of the two
camps, which is essential for ascertaining whether regulatory intervention is
in fact required to protect the Wi-Fi incumbent from the new LTE entrant. To
this end, we present a comprehensive coexistence study of Wi-Fi and
LTE-in-unlicensed, surveying a large parameter space of coexistence mechanisms
and a range of representative network densities and deployment scenarios. Our
results show that, typically, harmonious coexistence between Wi-Fi and LTE is
ensured by the large number of 5 GHz channels. For the worst-case scenario of
forced co-channel operation, LTE is sometimes a better neighbour to Wi-Fi -
when effective node density is low - but sometimes worse - when density is
high. We find that distributed interference coordination is only necessary to
prevent a "tragedy of the commons" in regimes where interference is very
likely. We also show that in practice it does not make a difference to the
incumbent what kind of coexistence mechanism is added to LTE-in-unlicensed, as
long as one is in place. We therefore conclude that LTE is neither friend nor
foe to Wi-Fi in the unlicensed bands in general. We submit that the systematic
engineering analysis exemplified by our case study is a best-practice approach
for supporting evidence-based rulemaking by the regulator.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Acces
