Power Control Based Spatial Reuse for LAA and WiFi Coexistence

A rising demand for larger network capacity is leading to the rapid development of the 5th Generation Mobile Communications System (5G). Due to the scarcity of spectrum resources of the conventional licensed band, 3GPP launched the research project of Licensed-Assisted Access using LTE (LAA) in September 2014, aiming to design a single global solution framework and protocol to ensure the efficient operation of LAA on unlicensed band (e.g. 5 GHz spectrum band). However, existing studies indicate that it is difficult to improve the performance of LAA and WiFi at the same time. In this paper, we propose a Power Control based Spacial Reuse scheme (PC-based SR) aiming at increasing the probability of concurrent transmissions in coexisting scenarios of LAA and WiFi. For LAA network, after recognizing existing WiFi signal, it should raise its Energy Detection (ED) threshold and transmit with adjusted power, and vice versa. Our simulation results show that, using the proposed method, the performance of both LAA and WiFi are improved and the fairness to WiFi is enhanced, with respect to throughput and latency.