Abstract
In recent years, to cope with the rapid growth in mobile data traffic, increasing the capacity of cellular networks is receiving more and more attention. To this end, offloading the current LTE‐advanced or 5G system’s data traffic from licensed spectrum to the unlicensed spectrum that is used by WiFi systems, i.e., LTE‐Licensed‐Assisted‐Access (LTE‐LAA), has been extensively investigated. In the current LTE‐LAA system, a Listen‐Before‐Talk (LBT) approach is implemented, which requires the LTE user also perform carrier sense before the transmission. However, fair LTE‐WiFi coexistence is still hard to guarantee due to their unbalanced frame sizes and traffic loads. In the LTE‐LAA system, the optimal channel selection and subframe number adjustment are the keys to realize efficient spectrum utilization and fair system coexistence. To this end, in this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning‐based joint channel/subframe selection scheme for LTE‐LAA. The proposed approach is implemented at the LTE access points with zero knowledge of the WiFi systems. The results of extensive simulations verify that the proposed approach can significantly improve the fairness and packet loss rate compared with baseline schemes.
Highlights
In the past few years, we have witnessed a phenomenal growth in mobile data traffic
Since most of the mobile data traffic is carried by cellular networks, both the academia and industry have made many attempts to increase the capacity of LTE networks to accommodate this surging growth and exploit the possible enhancement on the future 5G networks [1,2,3]
Notice that similar as the previous work [15, 17, 18], we focus on the selection of subframe number in this paper and leave the issue of selecting which subframe to use as the future work
Summary
In the past few years, we have witnessed a phenomenal growth in mobile data traffic. Based on the fact that LTE is a schedulebased technology, which would severely degrade the performance of WiFi by letting its transmission backoffs continuously, it is necessary to modify LTE to enable the fair coexistence between different wireless systems. To this end, Licensed-Assisted-Access (LAA) technology [4] has been proposed in 2013, which uses Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) approach to let LTE system assess the channel state before transmitting. In March 2020, 3GPP (ThirdGeneration Partnership Project) committed to 5G NR (New Radio) in unlicensed spectrum in Release 16, which extends the LAA from LTE to 5G [5, 6]
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