Abstract
Cellular broadband Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to keep growing year-by-year, generating demands from high throughput services. Since some of these applications are deployed over licensed mobile networks, as long term evolution (LTE), one already common problem is faced: the scarcity of licensed spectrum to cope with the increasing demand for data rate. The LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) forum, aiming to tackle this problem, proposed LTE-U to operate in the 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum. However, Wi-Fi is already the consolidated technology operating in this portion of the spectrum, besides the fact that new technologies for unlicensed band need mechanisms to promote fair coexistence with the legacy ones. In this work, we extend the literature by analyzing a multi-cell LTE-U/Wi-Fi coexistence scenario, with a high interference profile and data rates targeting a cellular broadband IoT deployment. Then, we propose a centralized, coordinated reinforcement learning framework to improve LTE-U/Wi-Fi aggregate data rates. The added value of the proposed solution is assessed by a ns-3 simulator, showing improvements not only in the overall system data rate but also in average user data rate, even with the high interference of a multi-cell environment.
Highlights
The increasing use of the wireless licensed spectrum, as well as its scarcity, comes with the massive demand from mobile data, as the number of wireless devices connected to the internet is expected to keep growing every day
It is imperative to review the basics of Wi-Fi and long term evolution (LTE)-U and show their differences
The aggregated transmitted data rate (LTE-U + Wi-Fi) presents its maximum only for DC 0.6, even though this DC value does not present the best possible data rate for Wi-Fi. This duty cycle value indicates that for this configuration and the offered data rate, the system reaches its maximum rate with LTE-U having more channel access time than Wi-Fi
Summary
The increasing use of the wireless licensed spectrum, as well as its scarcity, comes with the massive demand from mobile data, as the number of wireless devices connected to the internet is expected to keep growing every day. Targeting broadband IoT deployments, this duty cycle approach leads to a behavior where the energy consumption can even be reduced since the device with this technology operates following ON/OFF periods Even with this feature, LTE-U is rarely explored, because of the Wi-Fi monopoly and the LTE-M solution for licensed spectrum. As the demand and deployments of Wi-Fi grew up, new generations were standardized, bringing the creation of Wi-Fi 2, 3, 4 and 5, based on the 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n and 802.11ac, respectively, to cope with even higher data rates for even higher demands All these subsequent versions, except for Wi-Fi 3, use the 5 GHz band and adopt the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology, as LTE-LAA and LTE-U.
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