Coexistence of Wi-Fi and LAA Networks With Adaptive Energy Detection

Licensed-assisted access (LAA) of the long term evolution (LTE) has been standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in Release 13 to address the urgent issues of ever-increasing traffic demands in cellular systems. However, challenges arise for the efficient coexistence of Wi-Fi and LAA in the same unlicensed spectrum. In this paper, the impact of LAA's energy detection thresholds on such coexistence are investigated from the perspective of collisions occurring during downlink transmissions. To facilitate the efficient coexistence of Wi-Fi and LAA, a distributed algorithm is proposed to adaptively change the energy detection thresholds of LAA per user or per base station, so that the system encourages more concurrent transmissions without introducing too many collisions. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive algorithm.