QoS-Aware User Association and Resource Allocation in LAA-LTE/WiFi Coexistence Systems
Abstract: The licensed-assisted access-based long term evolution (LAA-LTE) is a promising solution to provide enhanced LTE services by sharing unlicensed bands with WiFi systems. However, the intense contention with the incumbent WiFi system makes it challenging for the LAA-LTE system to support guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) for the users. This paper is interested in the QoS-aware LAA-LTE/WiFi coexistence system. We first propose a flexible coexistence framework using the listen-before-talk mechanism, based on which the QoS metrics of LAALTE and WiFi systems are quantified. Then, a joint user association and resource allocation problem is formulated, which aims to maximize the number of QoS-preferred users supported by LAA-LTE, while protecting the WiFi users. The considered optimization problem is equivalently decomposed into two subproblems, the sum-power minimization problem and the user association problem. For the first subproblem, the deep-cut ellipsoid method is adopted to optimize the LAA-LTE transmission time, subcarrier assignment, and power allocation. For the latter one, an efficient algorithm called successive