A Field Trial on Opportunities for Improving the Unlicensed Spectrum Utilization of LTE
Yan Li, Shaoyi Xu, Rongtao Xu, Hantao Li, Zhenyu Li, Wenfang Tang · 2017
The cellular data traffic has been dramatically increased, a typical approach is considering the operation of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system in the unlicensed spectrum. Although there are a large number of theoretical researches on LTE-U, field trial results are still lacking. In this paper, we build a real time field trial in 5.8GHz unlicensed bands. The typical indoor scenario is deployed and we make field trials to evaluate the performance of LTE-U and Wi-Fi including coverage and capacity. Specifically, a methodology to determine the proper Clear Channel Assessment energy detection (CCA-ED) threshold for LTE-U is proposed to implement the friendly coexistence between LTE-U and Wi-Fi systems. Furthermore, experiments are also provided to validate the feasibility of the suggested method in various scenarios. Test results show that LTE-U can greatly improve the spectrum efficiency and optimize wireless resources. At the same time, a proper CCA- ED threshold is necessary for different systems coexisting friendly and fairly.