Energy Efficient and Fair Resource Allocation for LTE-Unlicensed Uplink Networks: A Two-sided Matching Approach with Partial Information

LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) has recently attracted worldwide interest to meet the explosion in cellular traffic data. By using carrier aggregation (CA), licensed and unlicensed bands are integrated to enhance transmission capacity while maintaining reliable and predictable performance. As there may exist other conventional unlicensed band users, such as Wi-Fi users, LTE-U users have to share the same unlicensed bands with them. Thus, an optimized resource allocation scheme to ensure the fairness between LTE-U users and conventional unlicensed band users is critical for the deployment of LTE-U networks. In this paper, we investigate an energy efficient resource allocation problem in LTE-U coexisting with other wireless networks, which aims at guaranteeing fairness among the users of different radio access networks (RANs). We formulate the problem as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose a semi-distributed matching framework with a partial information-based algorithm to solve it. We demonstrate our contributions with simulations in which various network densities and traffic load levels are considered.