Traffic balancing over licensed and unlicensed bands in heterogeneous networks

The rapid boosting in mobile traffic and the scarcity of available radio spectrum have hindered the improvement of capacity in cellular networks. It is necessary to discover an appropriate coexistence between cellular and other radio access technologies (mainly Wi-Fi) to offload the high traffic on to unlicensed bands. Dealing with joint time and power allocation to devices, a non-convex problem is modeled to maximize the throughput as well as guarantee the desired user satisfaction. A two-step traffic balancing scheme is proposed to derive the solution. We also focus on the inner competition among cellular users instead of traditional competition between cellular and Wi-Fi in the unlicensed bands. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed two-step traffic balancing scheme.