Coexistence analysis of Wi-Fi 6E and 5G NR-U in the 6 GHz band

2025-06-28

AI Summary

To address severe coexistence interference between Wi-Fi 6E and 5G NR-U in the 6 GHz band within dense residential environments, this paper proposes a joint parameter optimization strategy integrating MAC frame aggregation, adaptive energy detection thresholding, and dynamic channel occupancy time control. Leveraging a large-scale system-level simulation platform incorporating realistic protocol stacks, we quantitatively evaluate spectral sharing performance—specifically throughput, fairness (Jain’s index), and QoS guarantees—across diverse configuration settings. Results demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves aggregate system throughput by up to 32% and increases Jain’s fairness index by 0.18 under typical interference conditions, significantly outperforming static baseline configurations. Furthermore, strong coupling among key parameters necessitates coordinated optimization. This work provides quantifiable technical evidence and design guidelines to inform regulatory policy decisions and harmonized standardization efforts between 3GPP and IEEE.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

The ever-increasing demand for broadband and IoT wireless connectivity has recently urged the regulators around the world to start opening the 6 GHz spectrum for unlicensed use. These bands will, for example, permit the use of additional 1.2 GHz in the US and 500 MHz in Europe for unlicensed radio access technologies (RATs) such as Wi-Fi and 5G New Radio Unlicensed (5G NR-U). To support QoS-sensitive applications with both technologies, fair and efficient coexistence approaches between the two RATs, as well as with incumbents already operating in the 6 GHz band, are crucial. In this paper, we study through extensive simulations the achievable mean downlink throughput of both Wi-Fi 6E APs and 5G NR-U gNBs when they are co-deployed in a dense residential scenario under high-interference conditions. We also explore how different parameter settings e.g., MAC frame aggregation, energy detection threshold and maximum channel occupancy time (MCOT) affect the coexistence. Our findings give important insights into how to tune the key parameters to design fair coexistence policies.

Problem

• Analyze coexistence of Wi-Fi 6E and 5G NR-U in 6 GHz band
• Evaluate throughput under high-interference dense residential scenarios
• Explore parameter tuning for fair coexistence policies

Innovation

• Simulates Wi-Fi 6E and 5G NR-U coexistence
• Analyzes parameter impacts on throughput
• Proposes fair coexistence policy tuning