Qualcomm, SK Telecom Conduct Over-the-Air Trial of Enhanced LAA

Qualcomm this week announced what it called the first Over-the-Air trial of Enhanced Licensed Assisted Access (eLAA) technology with South Korean wireless provider SK Telecom.

According to a press release, the trial was conducted at SK Telecom’s Corporate R&D Center in Bundang, Korea and utilized 2.6 GHz LTE spectrum with 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum. Qualcomm said the technology can enable twice the capacity in unlicensed spectrum by creating a wider data pipe for both uplink and downlink.

Qualcomm said the test checked for coexistence with Wi-Fi by first establishing a baseline from only Wi-Fi users. Some of that baseline group was then switched from Wi-Fi to LAA or ELAA while the remainder were left on Wi-Fi. The company said the trial showed the users who remained on Wi-Fi were unaffected by those switched to LAA or eLAA.

Qualcomm said the sharing mechanism used by LAA and eLAA is listen-before-talk.

“This trial aims to demonstrate fair and harmonious coexistence of LAA with Wi-Fi in unlicensed spectrum,” Qualcomm Technologies Vice President of Product Management Eduardo Esteves said. “This is also a manifestation of Qualcomm Technologies’ and SK Telecom’s leadership in leveraging the latest technologies to improve user experience.”

Qualcomm’s eLAA test comes just after the release of the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Coexistence Test Plan for a similar unlicensed technology, LTE-U.

The LAA standards, however, are laid out in 3GPP’s Release 13.