Joint Time and Power Allocation for 5G NR Unlicensed Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint time and power allocation strategy for 5G NR-U systems to maximize throughput while ensuring fair coexistence with WiFi, using optimization and fairness constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resource allocation algorithm that jointly optimizes time and power for 5G NR-U, ensuring fairness with WiFi and improving throughput.

Findings

The proposed algorithm outperforms conventional strategies in simulations.

Fair coexistence with WiFi is achieved through proportional and throughput-based fairness.

Numerical results show significant throughput gains with the new resource allocation.

Abstract

The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks are designed to efficiently utilize the spectrum resources to meet various quality of service (QoS) requirements. The unlicensed frequency bands used by WiFi are mainly deployed for indoor applications and are not always fully occupied. The cellular industry has been working to enable cellular and WiFi coexistence. In particular, 5G New Radio in unlicensed channel spectrum (NR-U) supports the uplink and downlink transmission on the maximum channel occupation time (MCOT) duration. In this paper, we consider maximizing the total throughput of both downlink and uplink in NR-U by jointly optimizing the time and power allocation during MCOT while ensuring fair coexistence with WiFi. Fairness is guaranteed in two steps: 1) tuning the access related parameters of NR-U to achieve proportional fairness, and 2) including 3GPP fairness from the throughput perspective as a constraint in NR-U throughput maximization. Numerical analysis and simulation have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed resource allocation algorithm compared to conventional deployment strategies.