Efficient and fair Wi-Fi and LTE-U coexistence via communications over content centric networking

Abstract With the increasingly huge mobile traffic, numerous mobile operators try to seek some ways to alleviate the situation, such as expanding the LTE (Long Term Evolution) system into unlicensed spectrums. However, LTE-U (LTE in unlicensed spectrums) may interfere with Wi-Fi system that originally communicates in unlicensed spectrums and lead to marked decline of both Wi-Fi and LTE-U service qualities. To enable the fair coexistence of Wi-Fi and LTE-U systems in unlicensed spectrums, a novel mechanism over CCN (Content Centric Networking) containing two modes of communication (direct and indirect) between LTE-U and Wi-Fi systems is proposed in this paper. Moreover, the fair coexistence of LTE-U and Wi-Fi systems in unlicensed spectrums can be regarded as a resource allocation problem and formulated as a constrained optimization problem whose goal is to maximize the amount of data transmitted by different systems in a communication cycle, two approaches are also proposed to solve the optimization problem by adjusting the transmission time of different systems. The performance of the proposed mechanism and approaches is evaluated by simulations via NS-3 and theoretical calculations, the results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism and approaches can effectively ensure the fair coexistence of LTE-U and Wi-Fi in unlicensed spectrums and improve the overall channel utilization of unlicensed spectrums.