Enhancing the Coexistence of LTE and Wi-Fi in Unlicensed Spectrum Through Convolutional Neural Networks

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Over the last years, the ever-growing wireless traffic has pushed the mobile community to investigate solutions that can assist in more efficient management of the wireless spectrum. Towards this direction, the long-term evolution (LIE) operation in the unlicensed spectrum has been proposed. Targeting a global solution that respects the regional requirements, 3GPP announced the standard of LIE licensed assisted access (LAA). However, LIE LAA may result in unfair coexistence with Wi-Fi, especially when Wi-Fi does not use frame aggregation. Targeting a technique that enables fair channel access, the mLTE-U scheme has been proposed. According to mLTE-U, LTE uses a variable transmission opportunity, followed by a variable muting period that can be exploited by other networks to transmit. For the selection of the appropriate mLTE-U configuration, information about the dynamically changing wireless environment is required. To this end, this paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) that is trained to perform identification of LIE and Wi-Fi transmissions. In addition, it can identify the hidden terminal effect caused by multiple LTE transmissions, multiple Wi-Fi transmissions, or concurrent LIE and Wi-Fi transmissions. The designed CNN has been trained and validated using commercial off-the-shelf LIE and Wi-Fi hardware equipment and for two wireless signal representations, namely, in-phase and quadrature samples and frequency domain representation through fast Fourier transform. The classification accuracy of the two resulting CNNs is tested for different signal to noise ratio values. The experimentation results show that the data representation affects the accuracy of CNN. The obtained information from CNN can be exploited by the mLTE-U scheme in order to provide fair coexistence between the two wireless technologies.