Tac-U: A traffic balancing scheme over licensed and unlicensed bands for Tactile Internet

Abstract The low-frequency licensed spectrum resources have become scarce due to the various applications such as haptic communications supported by the next generation (5G) networks. Therefore, we have to improve the utilization of wireless resources and provide an effective radio resource management solution for the application of Tactile Internet. On the other hand, the Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks will become an integral part of the 5G ecosystem. Therefore, exploring the potential of LTE-A networks for haptic communications will become an important step toward realizing the Tactile Internet. In this paper, we investigate the utilization of LTE in unlicensed bands (LTE-U) technology for resource-constrained tactile networks, which enables a portion of the haptic communications to be used in unlicensed bands. Moreover, we propose Tac-U, which is an LTE-U technology-based traffic balancing scheme for Tactile Internet. We consider the real-time channel interference and traffic conditions of licensed and unlicensed bands to model a mathematical Tactile Internet, in which the LTE-U coexists with Wi-Fi and LTE, and formulate the system utility to evaluate the performance of the proposed traffic balancing scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can quickly calculate the optimal parameters, and significantly increase the sum utility of the system.