Quality of service-aware coexistence in unlicensed 5G new radio based on time-domain virtualization

The deployment of mobile systems is facing several challenges. Precisely, the lack of available licensed bands limits the network capacity, affecting the quality of service (QoS). Consequently, there has been significant interest in utilizing the unlicensed spectrum for mobile data traffic. 3GPP proposed and improved the coexistence of LTE and Wi-Fi in the unlicensed band starting in Release 13 and the following releases, such as LTE-LAA and 5G NR-U. This will cause significant interference and drastically affects the Wi-Fi users' QoS. To that end, we propose the use of time-domain virtualization between 5G NR-U and Wi-Fi systems. In particular, a scheduling algorithm is proposed, where the sharing mechanism is allocated in time slots rather than allocating a subband frequency for each technology. 5G use cases have different QoS requirements and our proposed solution aims at meeting these requirements. Accordingly, the performance is evaluated by studying the impact of resource virtualization and the coexistence configuration. Simulation results confirm that the minimum rate and maximum delay constraints are met. Moreover, it is shown that resource virtualization improves the throughput in both technologies. Furthermore, the delay performance is displayed for both 5G NR-U and Wi-Fi to show any impact of time-sharing coexistence.