LTE-U: A quick explainer

OK, so what’s LTE-U?

LTE-U is a system of wireless communication designed to use unlicensed spectrum –

which is open to everybody, within certain limits – to ease the burden on big mobile
carriers’ networks. Regular LTE is the system they use to transmit and receive
information across their licensed spectrum – to which only they have access. LTE-U
(short for Long-Term Evolution in unlicensed spectrum) uses the same “language” to
operate on the unlicensed spectrum, which the carriers don’t have to spend billions of
dollars to acquire.

Billions?

Oh, goodness, yes. The FCC has been busy auctioning off the rights to various parts of
the spectrum lately – companies bid for the rights to such-and-such a frequency in
specific geographic locations in the U.S. – and the last auction took in almost $45
billion.

Swell. So what’s the big deal?

Well, there’s this thing called Wi-Fi that operates on the unlicensed band in the 2.4GHz
and 5GHz ranges. Which is exactly the piece of spectrum that LTE-U wants to use. Two
radio waves in the same physical location at the same frequency means interference,
which means crappy service and “ugh-why-doesn’t-this-stupid-thing-work?”

Oh, well, that’s going to annoy just about everybody, huh?

Yep. Qualcomm – which invented LTE-U – swears up and down that they’re

incorporating coexistence features that will prevent it from harming existing Wi-Fi
installations, and to be fair, it seems highly unlikely that they’re just planning to throw
LTE-U out there, your home Wi-Fi be damned. The problem is, though, that we don’t
really have any way of knowing that for sure, nor any guarantees that the system will
operate the way it ought to.

How come?

Qualcomm didn’t present LTE-U to either of the big wireless industry standards bodies –
3GPP or IEEE – for formal testing and approval, even though they’ve been relatively up-
front about what the technology is going to entail. The idea will be to use a system
called CSAT (Carrier Sense Adaptive Transmission, before you ask) to make LTE-U
stations pause their transmissions for tiny periods to allow Wi-Fi to make use of the
same frequencies. The principle is called duty cycling.

That sounds fair enough – but people still have a problem?

Yeah – the thing about duty cycling is that the carriers are the ones in charge of
scheduling those pauses, and they’re under no real obligation to provide a decent
window of time for Wi-Fi to coexist. Remember, it’s unlicensed spectrum! But since Wi-
Fi is what’s known as a polite protocol, it will politely stop talking when the LTE-U is
transmitting – and even if it didn’t, all that would happen is the signals crashing into
each other and getting garbled. Basically, LTE-U’s coexistence mechanisms aren’t very
convincing to some people, and there’s no standards group that has the authority to
force it to play nice.

Well, that’s no good – what are the alternatives?

There’s a technology called Licensed Assisted Access or LAA that does roughly the
same thing as LTE-U, but folds in a standard called “listen before talk” (LBT), which
does pretty much what it sounds like. (Wi-Fi does this.) It’s not a perfect solution to the
main coexistence problem, but LTE-U critics say it’s considerably more even-handed
than Qualcomm’s plan. LBT is actually a legal requirement in the EU and Japan, so LAA
is the only game in those particular towns.

Huh. So why not just use that instead?

Because LAA is a 3GPP standard, and as such is going through a lengthy process of
testing and approval – which means that, in places that don’t legally mandate the use of
LBT, including the U.S. and China, companies could rush LTE-U to market quicker and
help take the pressure off their networks.

If the carriers have this huge demand problem, wouldn’t they want to make it
easier for people to use Wi-Fi instead?

Certainly, and LTE-U’s backers have been making this very point at great volume as
evidence that LTE-U won’t pose a coexistence problem. Realistically, it doesn’t seem
likely that any version of LTE-U that the carriers would release would cause Wi-Fi
Armageddon, and the problem seems more likely to be a matter of degrees – if LTE-U
helps ease a carrier’s network load, even if it has minor deleterious effects on Wi-Fi
networks in an area, they can probably live with that, given that there aren’t any real
consequences for them.

Uh-oh.

To be fair, there’s no need to freak out just yet – Verizon and T-Mobile, the strongest
advocates for LTE-U, have said that they’re not planning to roll the technology out until
next year, and a lot can happen between then and now. Discussions among industry
players are continuing, and FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has hinted that that agency
could get involved if the companies can’t come up with a more convincing solution to
the coexistence problem.
 Unlicensed spectrum use: What’s
the technology behind it?
Long-Term Evolution Unlicensed, LTE-Unlicensed, or LTE-U, is the extension of the LTE
wireless standard in the unlicensed spectrum, such as the 5 GHz bands used by 802.11a
and 802.11ac compliant Wi-Fi equipment. It is intended to enable wireless network
operators to offload traffic and enhance service to end users instead of replying on
carrier-owned Wi-Fi hotspots. LTE-U aims to bring carrier-grade quality of service (QoS)
to the unlicensed spectrum. LTE-U is not a monolithic technology; there are several
implementations, including License Assisted Access (LAA), enhanced LAA (eLAA), further
enhanced LAA (feLAA), and MulteFire.

Compared with Wi-Fi, LTE-U is expected to bring benefits in range and link budget,
spectral efficiency and capacity, configurable QoS, mobility, interoperability, high to low
rate scaling, spectrum options, security, and path to 5G New Radio, called NR-U. LTE-U,
and especially NR-U, have significantly different end-use targets compared with today’s
4G networks. 4G has evolved to bring increased levels of multimedia content to users;
NR-U is being developed with a focus on commercial and industrial uses, including the
industrial internet of things (IIoT), automation, and machine-to-machine
communications. Instead of improving multimedia experiences of users, 5G NR-U is
expected to be transformative in different ways, including:

 Supporting higher device densities

 Defined QoS
 Easier and more flexible deployment
 More robust security
 Higher reliability

The various LTE-U technologies are designed to leverage carrier aggregation (CA) and
supplemental downlink (SDL) protocols. LTE-U is expected to improve both coverage
and spectral efficiency compared with conventional Wi-Fi. The use of a licensed anchor
carrier is an important factor in delivering the anticipated benefits of LTE-U in all its
embodiments.
 Technology variants and relationships for LTE in unlicensed spectrum. (Image:  Qualcomm)

LAA, eLAA and feLAA

The process of deploying LTE-U accelerated in 2016 with the release of LAA by the Third
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). In 2020, 3GPP Release 16 became the foundation
for deploying 5G NR in unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) in the unlicensed 5GHz and 6GHz
bands.

The LTE-U evolution began with LAA, where LTE is operated for downlink only on an
unlicensed spectrum and a carrier in the licensed spectrum. eLAA added the ability for
the license-exempt operation of both downlinks and uplinks. Further enhanced LAA
(feLLA) added the ability to operate a license-exempt autonomous uplink. Finally, with
3GPP Release 16, standalone operation with NR is enabled, where an NR carrier can
operate independently in the unlicensed spectrum without an anchor link back to the
licensed spectrum.

3GPP Release 16 was frozen in July 2020. It generally takes 14 to 18 months for products
to come to market once a new 5G standard is frozen. So, products supporting NR-U’s
latest release could be expected on the market beginning in the third quarter of 2021.
 LTE-U technology evolution. (Image: Ericsson)

Coexisting with WiFi on unlicensed spectrum

Co-existence with current technologies such as Wi-Fi is an important consideration in
developing the various LTE-U technologies. There are two methods commonly used to
support sharing of unlicensed spectrum between WiFi and LTE-U users:

 In markets such as Europe, Japan, and India, regulations have been established
for unlicensed spectrum that requires equipment to periodically check for the
presence of other occupants in the channel (listen) before transmitting (talking) in
millisecond scale; this is often referred to as Listen Before Talk (LBT).
 In countries such as the United States, China, and South Korea, there is no
regulatory requirement for LBT for the unlicensed bands. A maximum energy
detection threshold methodology is used in these countries to support robustness,
fairness, scalability, and forward compatibility for cross-technology coexistence
with WiFi. This methodology enables operators to deploy LTE in unlicensed bands
compatible with Rel. 10/11 3GPP LTE standards.

Measurement of received energy and the detection of recognized modulated or

encoded signals are commonly used by WiFi devices as part of LBT protocols. Wi-Fi
devices send a “preamble” at the start of all transmissions that contain known reference
signals for synchronization and the length of the pending transmission. A Wi-Fi device
does not transmit if a Wi-Fi preamble is received at an energy level above a specified
threshold in a 20 MHz channel or if any energy is detected during LBT above a different
threshold, for example, from a non-Wi-Fi device.

Wi-Fi’s use of the preamble posed several problems for 3GPP implementations. The Wi-
Fi preamble specification is based on older technologies and is not considered an
efficient or compatible solution from a 3GPP perspective. And the sample rates and
OFDM sub-carrier spacings are not compatible with 3GPP. As a result, 3GPP uses a
maximum energy detection threshold methodology to support cross-technology
coexistence.

Typical channel coexistence such as LBT and Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) used
by WiFi are based on the concept of contention-based access. In these techniques,
transmitters are expected to sense the channel and make sure it is clean before
transmission. The goal of these algorithms is to provide coexistence across different
technologies in a time-division multiplexing (TDM) fashion.

In the case of highly-dense Wi-Fi and LTE-U environments, there may be no clean
channel available. When that occurs, LTE-U is designed to share a channel with a Wi-Fi
device or another LET-U device by using the Carrier-Sensing Adaptive Transmission
(CSAT) algorithm to employ adaptive TDM transmission to LTE-U small cells, based on
long-term carrier sensing of co-channel Wi-Fi activities.

Using CSAT, LTE-U cells sense the channel for a longer duration than LBT of CSMA (from
tens of msec to a few hundred msec). Based on the observed channel activities, the
CSAT algorithm defines a time cycle where the LTE-U cell transmits for a fraction of the
cycle and stays off the air for the remainder of the cycle. The duty cycle of the LTE-U
transmissions versus staying off the air is dictated by the sensed channel activities of
other technologies such as Wi-Fi.
 This 4×4 MIMO small cell with 20 ports can support multiple operators on high data rate frequency
bands, including 2.5GHz (5G MidBand), 3.5GHz citizens band radio service (CBRS), and 5GHz LAA.
(Image:  Alpha Wireless)

ETSI standards for LAA require equipment to periodically check for the presence of
other devices in the channel by employing LBT in the millisecond scale. The image
below details the requirements defined by ETSI for LBT for frame-based equipment. The
listening time is referred to as the Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) period. Before
transmitting, a device has to detect the channel’s energy level at a specific time during
the CCA period. If the channel’s energy level is below the defined CCA threshold, the
device can transmit for the duration of the Channel Occupancy Time (COT). Once the
COT has expired, the device is required to repeat the CCA process before any further
transmission can occur.
 ETSI LBT specification for LTE-U coexistence. (Image:  Qualcomm)

Multefire
MulteFire (sometimes called MuLTEfire) is tightly aligned with 3GPP Release 13 and
3GPP Release 14 specifications for LAA and eLAA, respectively, augmenting standard LTE
to operate globally unlicensed spectrum. It is designed for LTE-U deployments and can
act as a neutral host. MulteFire is simple to deploy (similar to Wi-Fi) and is suited for use
on any channels that need over-the-air contention for bandwidth sharing, such as the
global 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum band or shared spectrum in the 3.5 GHz Citizens
Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band in the U.S.

MulteFire is designed to support NR-U and standalone mode operation. (Image:  MDPI)
MulteFire supports a range of LTE services, including voice over LTE (VoLTE), Video over
LTE (ViLTE), mobile broadband data, user mobility, and IoT networks. A key goal of
MulteFire is to deliver the performance of LTE with the simplicity of Wi-Fi. As with
traditional cellular communications networks, MulteFire supports the full mobility of
users as they move around in a building, with seamless handovers between small cells.
In addition, MulteFire is designed to interconnect with external mobile networks to
provide service continuity and seamless handoffs when users leave the area of the
MulteFire network.

The recently-released MulteFire 1.1 version is a further evolution of LTE. While

maintaining backward compatibility with MulteFire 1.0. MulteFire 1.1, it adds four new
features to enhance MulteFire 1.0 capabilities, including:

 Grantless uplink transmission (GUL), Using GUL, the UL autonomous transmission

does not rely on an SR request. Therefore, if within a predefined set of radio
resources, which are configured on a per-cell basis, a UE succeeds LBT, then it can
start transmitting immediately. As a result, it will naturally coexist well with Wi-Fi as
the UE behavior is not different from Wi-Fi stations;
 Wide-coverage enhancement (WCE), Aims to improve the downlink (DL) link
budget for LTE cellular systems operating solely on unlicensed bands system. WCE
supports the improvement of the DL performance by nearly 8 dB compared to
MulteFire 1.0. It is designed to support applications in which have many
autonomous pieces of equipment that need to communicate with each other such
as automated guided vehicles (AGVs) or autonomous robots moving around large
areas;
 Autonomous user equipment (UE) mobility (AUM), is a new feature to
complement the normal controlled handover procedure. When a UE is being
configured for AUM mode, it is pre-configured with one or more potential target
cells. Upon certain conditions being met, the UE may autonomously contact the
target cell without informing the source cell. A UE can be configured on a per-cell
basis by the source cell to autonomously trigger and perform handover, without
receiving an explicit handover command or informing the source cell; and
 Self-organized networks (SON), encompasses solutions to self-configure and self-
optimize a network. It was introduced in LTE to facilitate the deployment of a
system and allow for further performance optimization. In MulteFire 1.1, SON
features have been introduced focusing on the network self-configuration or the
optimization of stand-alone networks operating in unlicensed spectrum and
networks deployed with the neutral host network (NHN) architecture.
Summary
LTE-U aims to bring carrier-grade quality of service (QoS) to the unlicensed spectrum.
LTE-U is not a monolithic technology; there are several implementations, including
License Assisted Access (LAA), enhanced LAA (eLAA), further enhanced LAA (feLAA),
MulteFire, and NR-U. The various LTE-U technologies are designed to leverage carrier
aggregation (CA) and supplemental downlink (SDL) protocols. LTE-U is expected to
improve both coverage and spectral efficiency compared with conventional Wi-Fi. The
use of a licensed anchor carrier is an important factor in delivering the anticipated
benefits of LTE-U.

References
3GPP technologies in unlicensed spectrum: A contributor to the common good, Ericsson
Future Is Unlicensed: Private 5G Unlicensed Network for Connecting Industries of Future,
MDPI
LTE in unlicensed spectrum, Wikipedia
LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum: Harmonious Coexistence with Wi-Fi, Qualcomm
MulteFire Release 1.1 Enhancements, MulteFire.org

https://youtu.be/H0Ezhq3DDdw