LTE/Wi-Fi co-existence under scrutiny: an empirical study

Mobile operators are seeking to increase network capacity by extending Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular operation into unlicensed frequency bands. While these efforts may respond to the projected exponential growth in mobile data traffic, significant concerns exist about the harmonious coexistence of LTE with incumbent Wi-Fi deployments. In this paper we characterise experimentally the LTE and Wi-Fi behaviour when sharing the same spectrum while operating under a broad range of network conditions. Specifically, we deploy a test bed with commodity Wi-Fi hardware and low-cost software-defined radio equipment running an open-source LTE stack. We investigate the user-level performance attainable over these technologies when employing different settings, including LTE duty cycling patterns, Wi-Fi offered loads, transmit power levels, modulation and coding schemes, and packet sizes. We show that co-existence is feasible without modifications to the Wi-Fi stack, if LTE periodically employs "silent" sub-frames; however, optimising the performance of both requires non-trivial tuning of multiple parameters in conjunction with close monitoring of Wi-Fi operation and detection of application-specific requirements. Our findings lay the foundations for coherent design of practical LTE/Wi-Fi co-existence mechanisms.