Harmonising Coexistence of Machine Type Communications With Wi-Fi Data Traffic Under Frame-Based LBT

Abstract

The existence of relatively long LTE data blocks within the licensed-assisted access (LAA) framework results in bursty machine-type communications (MTC) packet arrivals, which cause system performance degradation and present new challenges in Markov modeling. We develop an embedded Markov chain to characterize the dynamic behavior of the contention arising from bursty MTC and Wi-Fi data traffic in the LAA framework. Our theoretical model reveals a high-contention phenomenon caused by the bursty MTC traffic, and quantifies the resulting performance degradation for both MTC and Wi-Fi data traffic. The Markov model is further developed to evaluate three potential solutions aiming to alleviate the contention. Our analysis shows that simply expanding the contention window, although successful in reducing congestion, may cause unacceptable MTC data loss. A TDMA scheme instead achieves better MTC packet delivery and overall throughput, but requires centralized coordination. We propose a distributed scheme that randomly spreads the MTC access processes through the available time period. Our model results, validated by simulations, demonstrate that the random spreading solution achieves a near TDMA performance, while preserving the distributed nature of the Wi-Fi protocol. It alleviates the MTC traffic contention and improves the overall throughput by up to 10%.