An Efficient and Fair Wireless Resource Allocation Scheme for LTE and Wi-Fi over Unlicensed Bands
Ramin Yarinezhad, Eylem Ekici · 2023
Licensed spectrum of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is being strained with the increased traffic demand. To cope with this problem, mobile operators use the unlicensed spectrum to complement the available licensed spectrum. However, using LTE in unlicensed spectrum introduces new problems, such as the coexistence between LTE and other unlicensed communication technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi). This paper proposes a new coexistence mechanism to provide a fair coexistence between LTE and Wi-Fi networks on unlicensed bands. The proposed mechanism assigns resource blocks in eNodeB to LTE users in such a way that it provides efficient and fair usage of unlicensed spectrum for all LTE users and the Wi-Fi networks. We formulate the wireless resource allocation and fair coexistence problem between LTE and Wi-Fi as a non-linear integer programming. Then, we propose an approximation algorithm, which is a Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS), to solve this problem. Our numerical results validate the proposed mechanism's performance vis-a-vis other existing solutions.