Coexistence-Aware Scheduling for LTE and WLAN During Hard In-Device Interference

In-device interference of concurrently active radios can cause significant performance degradation in small devices such as smart phones. To avoid interference-related conflicts under challenging in-device conditions, we propose a generic radio scheduling architecture to the smart phone and small but important extensions to the LTE and WLAN protocols. To LTE, we propose scheduling duration extension to the discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism. This provides statistically guaranteed off-durations by limiting when new data can be scheduled. To WLAN, we propose coexistence-aware delivery, which enables efficient adaptation to interference-free time periods for incoming data by adding a deadline to the delivery. Based on detailed MAC-level simulations, we show that coexistence-aware radio scheduling with the proposed protocol extensions improve significantly the LTE/WLAN coexistence under hard in-device interference compared to the current state of the art.