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4G Americas has published a new whitepaper explaining how the mobile broadband industry is using unlicensed spectrum to enhance connectivity for consumers and enterprises. The paper reviews standardization-driven approaches including LWA, LAA, LTE-U and related techniques.
Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, said: “While securing and auctioning licensed exclusive-use spectrum should remain a priority across the Americas, licensed, shared and unlicensed bands must all be used efficiently.”
LTE-WLAN Aggregation (LWA) leverages the Evolved NodeB (eNodeB) to schedule packet delivery across LTE and Wi‑Fi links. By coordinating traffic on both links, LWA enables better use of available radio resources and increases combined user throughput.
License Assisted Access (LAA) refers to operating LTE in unlicensed bands. LAA lets operators and vendors reuse existing investments in LTE radio and Evolved Packet Core (EPC) infrastructure, simplifies UE design and maintains a common radio technology across licensed and unlicensed spectrum.
The LTE-U Forum has also published specifications and coexistence studies that define minimum requirements for base stations and user equipment for LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U), offering another path to deploy LTE in unlicensed spectrum while addressing Wi‑Fi coexistence considerations.
The whitepaper further examines alternative multi‑connectivity and aggregation approaches, including Multipath TCP (MP‑TCP) and QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections), which can combine multiple network paths at higher protocol layers.
Pearson added: “Intelligently integrating unlicensed spectrum offers a practical way to offload traffic while remaining spectrally efficient and using the same core radio technology across both licensed and unlicensed bands.”
The whitepaper is available from 4G Americas.