Resource Allocation for LTE-Based Heterogeneous Vehicular Network in Unlicensed Bands

The cellular data traffic has been dramatically increased, a typical approach is considering the operation of the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) system in the unlicensed spectrum. Although there are a large number of theoretical researches on operating LTE in unlicensed bands (LTE-U), researches about specific devices such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication which can be allowed to unlicensed bands are still lacking. In this paper, we build a new scene where LTE base station can divide the V2V devices into two parts, one part will be allowed to utilize the unlicensed band to serve themselves by ListenBefore-Talk (LBT) mechanism, and remaining devices will be regarded as normal users of LTE systems. A Lagrange Dual Method based algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of resource allocation, which is efficient and has low complexity. Numerical results show that the concomitant system has more excellent performance than a single Wi-Fi system. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional Greedy algorithm in terms of throughput maximization while satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.