ABSTRACT Since the opening of the 6 GHz bands for unlicensed radio access technologies (RATs), new coexistence mechanisms leveraging the currently uninhabited 6 GHz bands have been investigated, aiming for fair coexistence of Wi‐Fi 6 and 5G new radio unlicensed (NR‐U). However, our study shows that the utilization of the highly attractive 6 GHz bands can be significantly enhanced by exploring additional spectrum access opportunities, which remain unrealized in the existing channel contention mechanisms. We propose a novel two‐stage channel contention mechanism for the coexistence of Wi‐Fi 6 and 5G NR‐U in the 6 GHz bands to explore these missed spectrum access opportunities. We formulate the probability of interference to ongoing transmissions and utilize this probability to enhance the utilization of radio resources by allowing simultaneous transmissions on a channel. We incorporate cross‐technology communication (CTC) to compute this probability and formulate an optimization problem to derive the optimal CTC information required for the computation. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms legacy channel contention mechanisms in terms of spectrum utilization while ensuring the ongoing transmissions unharmed.
Rahman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.