Channel access mechanisms for video streaming over LTE-unlicensed

The exponential increase in the demand for higher mobile data rates is anticipated to cause bandwidth scarcity for LTE networks in the licensed spectrum. In an effort to mitigate this problem, the extension of LTE to the unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) has been proposed. However, operating LTE in the unlicensed spectrum is expected to cause a performance degradation for incumbent unlicensed systems, especially WiFi, due to the differences in the channel access mechanisms adopted by the two technologies. Several LTE channel access mechanisms for enabling fair and friendly coexistence with WiFi in the unlicensed spectrum have been proposed and evaluated. This paper further explores the design of LTE-U channel access mechanisms from the perspective of video streaming. Specifically, two channel access mechanisms for utilizing both the licensed and unlicensed LTE channels for video streaming are proposed. The proposed mechanisms take into account the difference in the availability of the two types of the channels along with the structure of the encoded video file. The performance of the proposed access mechanisms are compared via simulations. The results show that the proposed schemes outperform the classical Listen Before Talk (LBT) channel access mechanism.