Fairness-aware hybrid resource allocation with cross-carrier scheduling for LTE-U system

Recently, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes to extend the Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) to the unlicensed spectrum, named Long Term Evolution Unlicensed (LTE-U), which enables LTE to operate in both the licensed band and the unlicensed band. In this paper, we consider how to make LTE-U get even higher throughput in the high traffic unlicensed band. In order to achieve this target, there is a big challenge to make LTE-U a good neighbor to the existing wireless communication technologies in the unlicensed band, such as WIFI system in the 5 GHz band. In our research, we assume two carriers aggregated, one is from licensed band, and the other is from unlicensed. We also define two kinds of frequency resources in the unlicensed band. One is the normal frequency resource that has not been utilized by the WIFI systems, and the other is the special frequency resource that has been utilized by the WIFI systems already. We propose a novel hybrid resource allocation algorithm by combining two different frequency sharing schemes (Underlay and Interweave) and apply different resource allocation algorithm to achieve higher throughput for all kinds of user equipment (UE) from LTE-U when the WIFI system’s traffic is heavy. We also consider the fairness for all UEs from LTE-U system and guarantee that the interference to the WIFI UEs (WUEs) is acceptable.