Licensed-Assisted Access to Unlicensed Spectrum in LTE Release 13

Exploiting the unlicensed spectrum is considered by 3GPP as one promising solution to meet ever-increasing traffic growth. As a result, one major enhancement for LTE in Release 13 has been to enable its operation in the unlicensed spectrum via licensed-assisted access (LAA). In this article, we provide an overview of the Release 13 LAA technology including motivation, use cases, LTE enhancements for enabling the unlicensed band operation, and the coexistence evaluation results contributed by 3GPP participants.