NR-U and IEEE 802.11 Technologies Coexistence in Unlicensed mmWave Spectrum: Models and Evaluation

Abstract

New Radio-based access to Unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) intends to expand the applicability of 5G NR access technology to support operation in unlicensed bands by adhering to Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) requirement for accessing the channel. As the NR-U specification is being developed, simulations to assess the performance of NR-U and IEEE 802.11 technologies coexistence in unlicensed spectrum bands are crucial. In this paper, we report on extensions to a popular and open source network simulator, ns-3, to build an NR-U system-level simulator and to model the NR-U and IEEE 802.11 technologies coexistence in the currently available unlicensed spectrum bands. The proposed NR-U model capitalizes on an NR Release-15 based model that has been extended to operate in unlicensed bands, while meeting its regulatory requirements. For the coexistence analysis, we pay particular attention to the millimeter-wave bands and provide a complete set of simulation campaigns evaluating the coexistence of NR-U and IEEE 802.11ad Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) in the 60 GHz bands. In particular, we focus on determining whether NR-U fulfills its coexistence objective in terms of a fairness criterion by testing different NR-U parameters, such as the numerology, the bandwidth, the channel access scheme, the energy detection threshold, and the beamforming method.

Assessing the impact of DRS signaling in unlicensed indoor coexistence scenarios

“…Further works would consider additional dynamic environmental conditions to drive further coexistence optimizations of the signaling in the physical downlink shared channel which may be applied for future standards operating in unlicensed bands. These include the application of directional LBT methods for mmwaves [23] or the use of contention methods for the uplink signaling channel as in NR-U stand-alone mode.…”

Enhanced Remote Areas Communications: The Missing Scenario for 5G and Beyond 5G Networks

“…There is no single technology today that can address all requirements presented in Table 1. Some technologies that can partially address the demand in remote areas are: • NR-U: The unlicensed spectrum access introduced by the 3GPP in 5G networks, named NR for unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) [33] will initially allow 5G networks to exploit the unlicensed spectrum in the 5/6 GHz bands and other frequencies in the Millimeter Wave (mmWave) bands will also be included. Two operational modes are possible.…”

Performance-Fairness Trade-off for Wi-Fi and LTE-LAA Coexistence

“…The overall aim of the above mentioned variants is the fair coexistence among different radio technologies, i.e., an LTE network should not impact on the Wi-Fi network more than an additional Wi-Fi network in terms of throughput [6].The idea of unlicensed spectrum sharing is extended to become the part of fifth generation new radio unlicensed (NR-U) standard [7]. LAA has been proposed as the basis for the channel access mechanism for 5G New Radio-Unlicensed (NR-U) by industry and academia [8]- [10]. In this work, we focus on LTE-LAA/ Wi-Fi coexistence.…”