Duty-cycle based licensed-assisted access: Does proportional fairness affect Wi-Fi more than it should?

Abstract

The exponentially increasing demand for higher data rates has pushed the mobile network operators and researchers to scout for ways to improve the system bandwidth, most notably by using the unlicensed band which already hosts long-standing technologies like Wi-Fi. Of late, some effort has gone into exploring the performance of Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) which can boost the bandwidth of LTE by opportunistically anchoring a secondary carrier in the unlicensed band in addition to the primary licensed carrier. Duty-cycle based schemes are being looked at to fasttrack the commercial deployment of LAA, and falling along this line of thought, the current state of the art scheme in the literature proposes a proportionally fair duty-cycle based LAA scheme. In this work, we investigate the interesting question of whether a proportionally fair duty-cycle based LAA scheme affects the performance of Wi-Fi more than it should.