Summary
The first true multitechnology communication system is 5G, which is expected to have a large impact on society and industry. The European Commission funded H2020 5G‐PPP Phase 2 project SaT5G addressed the plug‐and‐play integration of satellite communication into 5G. One of the SaT5G use cases corresponds to the delivery of 5G connectivity services to moving platforms such as aircraft via GEO/MEO satellite backhauling. With focus on this use case, this paper elaborates on the practical implementation and measurement results obtained within the 5G Aero testbed developed as part of the SaT5G project. The 5G Aero testbed activities focus on the next generation of connectivity and content distribution services to airplanes through satellite and terrestrial integration in 5G at the user, control and management planes. Software‐defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) are key enablers to develop a powerful end‐to‐end testbed that can accelerate the adoption of multi‐access edge computing (MEC) for the next‐generation in‐flight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC) services, which use geostationary (GEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellite backhauling technologies. Hence, measurement results obtained from both over‐the‐air demonstration over the O3b MEO satellite constellation and in‐lab validation over an emulated GEO satellite link are presented, towards the next‐generation 5G‐enabled IFEC services.
WiFi networks are known to be a cost-efficient traffic offloading solution for mobile networks. The Multi Access Packet Data Network Connectivity is a feature introduced in LTE Release 10 in order to allow users to be simultaneously connected to multiple radio access networks (RAN). Although this feature brings many advantages, such as the possibility to implement QoS-based traffic steering, it poses also many challenges, one of which is distributing traffic among the two radio access technologies. In this paper, we propose a trafficaware user association algorithm for heterogeneous LTE/WiFi RANs. The proposed algorithm is formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem jointly optimizing user association and resource allocation. A heuristic is also proposed in order to address the scalability issues of the ILP-based algorithm. Numerical simulations are used in order to compare the proposed approaches. Finally, we implemented and tested the heuristic in small-scale testbed using the 5G-EmPOWER platform.
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