Redefining Fairness: Enhanced Waiting Time Allocation for Coexisting Wi-Fi and Licensed Assisted Access
Rana Veer Samara Sihman Bharattej R, Baker Karim, PARVATHAREDDY SOWMYA, Rama Venkatasubramanian, Srinivas Samala · 2025
The growing demand for unlicensed spectrum has strengthened the coexistence challenges among Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and Long-Term Evolution Licensed Assisted Access (LTE-LAA) networks; however, traditional Listen Before Talk (LBT) mechanisms are inefficient. Thus, spectrum-sharing techniques aim to confirm fair access in shared frequency bands by adjusting transmission behavior. However, existing systems face challenges owing to the dependence on Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ)-based contention window updates. Therefore, it fails to consider real-time Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) activity, leading to unfair channel access. Hence, this research proposes a beta distribution-based enhanced Fixed Waiting Time (FWT) mechanism to confirm that LTE-LAA transmissions wait appropriately based on actual Wi-Fi usage patterns. Initially, data was collected from simulated network environments that modeled the coexistence behavior of Wi-Fi and LTE-LAA systems in unlicensed frequency bands. This model monitors the Wi-Fi duration through energy detection and utilizes statistical modeling to compute the wait time. Subsequently, the static waiting time is utilized to control the LTE-LAA access without requiring HARQ feedback. Finally, the proposed FWT model attained better results in terms of throughput (12.8 Mbps) when compared to the existing LBT mechanism.