A Field Trial of Wi-Fi Co-Existing with U-LTE Based on Cell On/Off on Unlicensed Spectrum
Zheng Li, Chuan Liu, Hantao Li, Zhenyu Li · 2016
In response to ever-increasing of mobile broadband data traffic demands, integrating unlicensed carrier into the traditional LTE system on licensed spectrum, namely Unlicensed LTE (U-LTE), is an effective solution. Considering that the unlicensed spectrum is shared by a variety of communication systems such as the Wi-Fi system, one essential target of U-LTE design is to guarantee fair co-existence. To guarantee backward compatibility, the cell on/off on unlicensed spectrum can be adopted as the co-existence mechanism, which can be performed based on current LTE architecture without specification impact. In this paper, we provide the indoor field trial results for the co-existence of U- LTE and Wi-Fi on 5GHz band. Two typical indoor test scenarios of dense and ultra-dense deployments are considered, and the performances are evaluated in terms of network capacity and user perceived throughput for users located with various distances to the serving cell. It is shown by trial results that Wi-Fi is not adversely impacted by U-LTE performing the cell on/off on unlicensed spectrum under these two scenarios. In addition, U-LTE outperforms Wi-Fi especially for cell edge users due to its reliable transmission.