LTE UL Power Control for the Improvement of LTE/Wi-Fi Coexistence

Spectrum sharing is a powerful alternative to deal with the exponential increase on the wireless communication capacity demand. In this context, the coexistence of two of the most prominent wireless technologies today, Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Wi-Fi, is an important research topic. In the most common Wi-Fi network operation, the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), communication nodes access the channel only if the interference level is below a certain threshold. Then, Wi-Fi operation is severely affected when in coexistence with LTE. This paper proposes the use of LTE uplink (UL) power control to improve LTE/Wi-Fi coexistence. With the introduction of an additional factor to the conventional LTE UL power control, a controlled decrease of LTE UL transmit powers is carried out according to interference measurements, giving opportunity to Wi-Fi transmissions. The proposed LTE UL power control with interference aware power operating point is a flexible tool to deal with the trade-off between LTE and Wi-Fi performances in coexistence, since it is able to set different LTE/Wi-Fi coexistence configurations with the choice of a single parameter. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can provide similar or better performance for both LTE and Wi-Fi networks than a previously proposed interference avoidance mechanism.