Resource Allocation for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks in Unlicensed Frequency Bands

In this paper, a resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the throughput of vehicular user equipments (VUEs) in both licensed, and unlicensed frequency bands under constraints of reliability, and latency for vehicular communications as well as the Quality of Service (QoS) for WiFi network based on a network system with coexisting VUEs, and WiFi user equipments (WUEs). In the system, the VUEs are able to access to the unlicensed frequency bands, and the interference among the VUEs, and WUEs are mitigated by the listen-before-talk (LBT) scheme or the duty cycle scheme. Due to the mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) objective in the optimization problem, the problem is hard to be solved directly. Instead, we solve the problem by two steps. The number of VUEs offloaded to unlicensed frequency bands as well as the time factor for duty cycle scheme is firstly determined, and then, the optimization problem is converted into a convex optimization problem, which is solved by the proposed Lagrange Duality Method (LDM). Numerical results show the efficiency of our proposed application scenario compared to case with only LTE system or only WiFi system. Moreover, compared to traditional Greedy algorithm, the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of throughput with a guaranteed QoS of WUEs.