CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This patent application is a 35 USC § 371 U.S. national stage of International Application No. PCT/CN2018/090812 filed on Jun. 12, 2018, which claims a priority to Chinese Patent Application No. 201710487447.X filed with the Chinese Patent Office on Jun. 23, 2017, which are incorporated by reference herein.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure relates to the field of communication technologies, in particular to a method of transmitting information in an unlicensed band and a network device.

BACKGROUND

In future communication systems, the unlicensed band may be used as a supplement to the licensed band to help operators to expand capacity. The unlicensed band may occupy the 5 GHz, 37 GHz, and 60 GHz bands to keep deployment in the New Radio (NR) system consistent and to maximize unlicensed access based on the NR system. Although a large bandwidth (80 MHz or 100 MHz) of the unlicensed band may reduce the implementation complexity of a base station and user equipment (UE), due to the fact that the unlicensed band is shared by a plurality of radio access technologies (RATs), for example, the wireless fidelity (WiFi), the radar, the long term evolution license assisted access (LTE-LAA), etc., certain regulations, such as listen before talk (LBT) or maximum channel occupancy time (MCOT), must be met when the unlicensed band is used, to ensure that all devices may use the resource fairly.

In the 5th Generation (5G) mobile communication system, or the NR system, for the purpose of initial access, or radio resource management (RRM) measurement, etc., the network device is required to send a synchronized signal block (SS Block), such that UE may perform measurement, evaluation and the like based thereon. The synchronized signal block is composed of a New Radio primary synchronized signal (NR-PSS) and a New Radio secondary synchronized signal (NR-SSS) and a New Radio physical broadcast channel (NR-PBCH) signal, and is sent periodically. For the UE in a connected state, an idle state, and a non-standalone state, the network device may configure a transmission period of the synchronized signal block to be 5 milliseconds (ms), 10 ms, 20 ms, 40 ms, 80 ms, or 160 ms. Regardless of the period, the synchronized signal block should be completed in a window of 5 ms.

As far as the licensed band is concerned, the network device may periodically send the synchronized signal block; while for the unlicensed band, since the unlicensed band is shared by a plurality of access technologies and the contention-based access mode leads to uncertainty in channel available time, the transmission of the synchronized signal block may no longer be guaranteed. Therefore, the mechanism of periodically sending the synchronized signal block is no longer applicable.

SUMMARY

Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a method of transmitting information in an unlicensed band and a network device.

In a first aspect, an embodiment of the present disclosure provides a method of transmitting information in an unlicensed band. The method is applied to a network device side and includes: when there is a synchronized signal block to be transmitted, performing LBT at an LBT position of a time domain transmission unit where a candidate transmission position of the synchronized signal block is located, to obtain an LBT result of a channel; and sending, at the candidate transmission position of the synchronized signal block, the corresponding synchronized signal block to UE if the LBT result of the channel indicates that the channel is idle.

In a second aspect, an embodiment of the present disclosure further provides a network device. The network device includes: an LBT module, configured to, when there is a synchronized signal block to be transmitted, perform LBT at an LBT position of a time domain transmission unit where a candidate transmission position of the synchronized signal block is located, to obtain an LBT result of a channel; and a first sending module, configured to send, at the candidate transmission position of the synchronized signal block, the corresponding synchronized signal block to UE if the LBT result of the channel indicates that the channel is idle.

In a third aspect, an embodiment of the present disclosure provides a network device. The network device includes a processor, a storage and a computer program stored in the storage and executable by the processor, where the processor is configured to execute the computer program, to implement steps of the foregoing method of transmitting information in an unlicensed band.

In a fourth aspect, an embodiment of the present disclosure provides a computer readable storage medium storing therein a computer program, where the computer program is configured to be executed by a processor, to implement steps of the foregoing method of transmitting information in an unlicensed band.

