Using self-deferral to achieve fairness between Wi-Fi and NR-U in downlink and uplink scenarios

Wireless networks operating in unlicensed bands generally use one of two channel access paradigms: random access (e.g., Wi-Fi) or scheduled access (e.g., LTE License Assisted Access, LTE LAA and New Radio-Unlicensed, NR-U). The coexistence between these two paradigms is based on listen before talk (LBT), which was, however, designed for random access. Meanwhile, scheduled systems require that their transmissions start at the beginning of a slot boundary. Synchronizing this boundary to the end of LBT usually requires transmitting a reservation signal (RS) to block the channel. Since the RS is a waste of channel resources, we investigate an alternative self-deferral approach (gap-based access) using analytical and simulation models. We put forth a proposal to employ only self-deferral, treat the gap mechanism as a partial backoff, and adjust the contention window (CW) settings to the number of coexisting nodes. We demonstrate that this approach not only ensures fairness in Wi-Fi/NR-U coexistence but also avoids wasting radio channel resources and improves aggregate network throughput. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach outperforms RS-based access and provides significant throughput and fairness gains. Finally, we implement a long short-term memory-based (LSTM) regression model to predict those Wi-Fi/NR-U CW settings which lead to coexistence fairness.