Augmented Wi-Fi: An AI-based Wi-Fi Management Framework for Wi-Fi/LTE Coexistence

Abstract

Recently, the operation of LTE in unlicensed bands has been proposed to cope with the ever-increasing mobile traffic demand. However, the deployment of LTE in such bands implies sharing spectrum with mature technologies such as Wi-Fi. Several studies have discussed this coexistence problem by suggesting that LTE implements different adaptation mechanisms that allow transmission possibilities to Wi-Fi. While such adaptation mechanisms exist, they still negatively impactWi-Fi performance, mainly due to the lack of collaboration/coordination mechanisms that inform about the co-located networks' activities. In this paper, we propose a distributed spectrum management framework that enhances the performance of Wi-Fi, as a particular case, by detecting harmful co-located wireless networks and changes the Wi-Fi's operating central frequency to avoid them. The framework is based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that can identify different wireless technologies and provides spectrum usage statistics. Experiments were carried out in a real-life testbed, and the results show that Wi-Fi maintains its performance when using our framework. This translates in an increase of at least 40% on the overall throughput compared to a non-managed operation of Wi-Fi.