Unlicensed Carrier Selection and User Offloading in Dense LTE-U Networks

Due to the scarcity of licensed spectrum, Long-Term Evolution (LTE) operation in unlicensed spectrum is a promising solution to provide high data rate and to reduce the load on licensed spectrum. In Release 13, 3GPP introduced LTE in Unlicensed (LTE-U) as Licensed Assisted Access (LAA). In LTE-U, Carrier Aggregation (CA) feature aggregates licensed and unlicensed spectrum to get higher bandwidth. Use of unlicensed spectrum by Wi-Fi and LTE-U networks results in more interference because of lack of coordination and thereby makes it challenging for LTE-U operators to select best component carrier from available unlicensed carriers in case of dense deployments. In this paper, for efficient LTE-U operation, we propose dynamic Unlicensed Component Carrier Selection (UCCS) algorithm which minimizes interference from other networks (Wi-Fi and LTE-U). The algorithm considers fairness factor to achieve better performance for each User Equipment (UE). Further, the user offloading algorithm offloads those UE(s) to licensed carrier that are getting lesser throughput due to interference from adjacent cells operating on the same unlicensed carrier. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms Random and Least Received Power channel selection schemes