Aggregating LTE and Wi-Fi: Toward Intra-Cell Fairness and High TCP Performance

The data explosion and resource scarcity of mobile cellular networks require new paradigms to effectively integrate heterogeneous radio resources. Of many candidate approaches, smart aggregation of LTE and Wi-Fi radios is a promising solution that bonds heterogeneous links to meet a mobile terminal’s bandwidth need. Motivated by the existence of a significant number of carrier operated Wi-Fi APs, we propose an easily deployable mechanism, called LTE-W, which efficiently utilizes LTE and Wi-Fi links only with the minimum change of eNodeBs, LTE backhaul networks, and mobile terminals. LTE-W, which is a link-level aggregation mechanism, has the following two key components: 1) mode selection and 2) bearer-split scheduling. First, in the mode selection, LTE-W internally decides who should be served by either LTE-only or LTE-Wi-Fi aggregation considering intra-cell fairness rather than just following users’ intention of aggregation. For the users’ preference to be offered the aggregation service, we choose a bearer (roughly defined in LTE as a set of flows with a similar QoS) as a basic unit of aggregation and propose a smart intra-bearer scheduling algorithm that splits a bearer’s traffic into LTE and Wi-Fi links, considering the performance of TCP flows that take two heterogeneous wireless links. We evaluate our mechanism using the NS-3 with LENA, under various configurations, including nodes with mobility and HTTP traffic, and compare it with a transport-level aggregation mechanism, multipath TCP (MPTCP), demonstrating that LTE-W significantly improves MPTCP, e.g., up to 75% in terms of Jain’s fairness index.