Performance Modeling of an NR-U and WiFi Coexistence System With NR-U Type B Multichannel Access Procedure

New radio-based access to unlicensed bands (NR-U) multichannel access procedures are 3GPP standards for supporting 5G NR-U and WiFi coexistence in unlicensed frequency bands. NR-U provides a new solution to alleviating the severe spectrum scarcity problem of 5G cellular networks in licensed frequency bands for supporting diverse Internet of Things (IoT) services. This article studies the performance modeling of an NR-U and WiFi coexistence system using the NR-U Type B multichannel access procedure and the WiFi DCF procedure and focuses on a system model with two unlicensed channels: 1) a primary channel and 2) a secondary channel. 2-D Markov models are first built to describe the NR-U category-4 LBT procedure and the WiFi DCF procedure on the primary channel, respectively. A 3-D Markov model is then built to describe the WiFi DCF procedure on the secondary channel, taking into account the effect of the NR-U Type B multichannel access procedure. Based on the built Markov models, performance models are further derived for analyzing the system performances in terms of system throughput and packet delay on the primary channel and/or secondary channel. The derived performance models are validated through simulation results. The impacts of the number of NR-U gNBs/WiFi APs and major system parameters on the system performances are investigated based on the derived performance models.