Enhanced Collision Resolution Methods With Mini-Slot Support for 5G NR-U

Abstract

To improve the capacity of cellular systems without additional expenses on licensed frequency bands, the 3GPP consortium has designed cellular technologies that use the unlicensed spectrum. The important peculiarity of the usage models of these technologies, the latest of which is New Radio Unlicensed (NR-U), is the coexistence with Wi-Fi networks deployed in the same frequency band. That is why NR-U uses channel access methods similar to those of Wi-Fi. However, the performance of Wi-Fi networks notably deteriorates in coexistence scenarios. One of the reasons is the slotted structure of transmissions of cellular base stations in the unlicensed spectrum, which may imply the use of a reservation signal. The paper proposes two novel channel access methods for NR-U, in which an NR-U base station randomly stops sending the reservation signal to listen to the channel to detect and resolve collisions. Analytical models are developed to validate the proposed methods and evaluate their efficiency, taking into account important features of NR-U networks, such as flexible numerology and mini-slot transmissions. The obtained numerical results show that the proposed methods significantly improve the performance of the Wi-Fi or NR-U network without degradation of the throughput of the other technology in coexistence scenarios.