Coexistence of WiFi and LTE in the Unlicensed Band Using Time-Domain Virtualization

In recent years, there has been great interest in utilizing the unlicensed spectrum for mobile data traffic, as deployment of mobile systems are facing severe challenges due to licensed spectrum scarcity. Increasing the bandwidth is a possible solution to increasing the network capacity, however, the licensed spectrum is limited and can be very costly to obtain. Additionally, the lack of available licensed band limits the network capacity which may affect the user experience. Due to this limitation, the research focuses on the coexistence of the LTE and Wi-Fi in the unlicensed band. Currently, there is minimal to no sharing mechanism between the two technologies, which will cause significant interference for the users. This project focuses on using the time-domain virtualization, where the sharing mechanism is allocated in time slots rather than allocating frequency for each technology. The coexistence mechanism of the two technologies are discussed and evaluated using the simulation of a proposed scheduling algorithm.