SCALAA - Spidercloud – Licensed assisted access

This project was funded by Spidercloud Wireless to design, develop and evaluate 3GPP LAA and LTE-U.

Recently, there has been much interest by cellular network industry in utilizing unlicensed spectrum to expand the spectrum resources. In particular, two LTE unlicensed technologies gained much interest: LAA and LTE-U. While these are rapidly emerging in the market, there are not many studies in the literature that are providing a complete evaluation and comparison of their performance. One of the reasons is that despite the large body of simulation results by industry and academia, the simulators are not publicly available, and the analytical models proposed in the literature do not offer complex enough frameworks for thorough performance evaluations. To carry out an evaluation study, we have built a detailed simulation platform, strictly complying with standards and specifications.

In this study we have provided an overview, performance evaluation and comparison of LAA and LTE-U. We have focused on the impact of unlicensed LTE on the already existing WiFi system using the same spectrum. We have further evaluated and compared performance of LAA and LTE-U in a wide variety of real world scenarios, following 3GPP and WiFi alliance guidelines. Our study also included scenarios involving TCP which is a rarely treated topic in the literature in the context of LTE and WiFi coexistence.

Poster:

Evaluating Unlicensed LTE technologies: LAA vs LTE-U