Full-Duplex MAC in LAA/ Wi-Fi Coexistence Networks: Design, Modeling, and Analysis

Abstract

Long-term evolution (LTE) deployment in the unlicensed band has been a promising solution to handle the ever-increasing data traffic growth. However, spectrum sharing on unlicensed band poses a significant challenge regarding the interaction between LTE licensed assisted access (LAA) and Wi-Fi. In this paper, a radio access technology (RAT) heterogeneous network that consists of an LAA tier and a Wi-Fi tier is constructed, to achieve the coexistence and alleviate the intra-RAT and inter-RAT interference, a listen-and-talk (LAT) scheme is utilized in Wi-Fi while LAA adopts the listen-before-talk (LBT). By leveraging the full-duplex (FD) techniques in Wi-Fi, the collision can be avoided and the utilization of unlicensed spectrum can be improved. Furthermore, the sensing errors are derived based on the FD strategy and an enhanced Markov model is presented to analyze the performance of the heterogeneous network with consideration of the residual self-interference (RSI). The fairness between LAA and Wi-Fi is also investigated. At last, to ensure the performance of Wi-Fi when serious RSI exists, a switched MAC (S-MAC) that can adaptively switch between the FD mode and half-duplex (HD) mode is presented.