An efficient SDN‐based LTE‐WiFi spectrum aggregation system for heterogeneous 5G networks

Abstract

Nowadays, the continuously increasing demand for high data traffic and providing different quality of services (QoS) to the customer are very challenging tasks for all network operators. In the last few years, mobile data traffic is increased to a significant extent and half of the traffic is provided through WiFi technology which is known as WiFi offloading. To overcome the increasing traffic demand, WiFi offloading is the best option to reduce the burden of cellular networks. So, by aggregating existing indoor WiFi technology to the cellular network increases the network capacity and provides better QoS to customers. In this article, we propose and implement the LTE-WiFi aggregation system where eNodeB is responsible for the aggregation of the WiFi access point without modifying the core network. Furthermore, the proposed system is integrated with the mobile-CORD (M-CORD) platform which leverages software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and cloud technologies for providing a 5G environment. M-CORD platform has three main modules: service orchestrator (XOS), SDN controller ONOS, and OpenStack. One of the important features of M-CORD is to provide virtualized core network functions that enable the users to automatically customize, monitor, and control the resources of the network. Due to ONOS controller support, we can easily scale up the network instances by giving the configurations to service orchestrator XOS of the M-CORD. The implementation of the proposed system is based on the OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform which provides open sources implementation of core and access networks. The aggregation of both LTE and WiFi technologies is done at the PDCP layer in a very tight coupling way. Moreover, we test our proposed system with three kinds of policies for UDP and TCP traffic: LTE only, WiFi only, and LTE-WiFi aggregated. The experimental results show that our proposed LTE-WiFi aggregated system gives better performance and provides high bandwidth as compared to the LTE network.

Mathematical framework for 5G‐UAV relay

“…Integrating backhaul links to a common-haul network based on SDN/NFV. 23 Three-layered architecture for PS-4G 24 Communication services Highlighted the disaster-resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PS LTE).…”

QoS-Based Data Aggregation and Resource Allocation Algorithm for Machine Type Communication Devices in Next-Generation Networks

“…In [51], the authors proposed an LTE-WiFi spectrum aggregation (LWA) based on the M-CORD platform which is used as an SDN platform to provide network function virtualization (NFV), cloud computing, edge computing, and virtualized RAN capabilities. They integrated WiFi with LTE in a very tight coupling scheme.…”

“…A simulation model using MATLAB is designed to analyze the system performance in terms of throughput, utilization, loss ratio, and average packet delay. This paper also presents a survey of the literature covering the majority of works in the field of study, including smart gateway, data aggregation based on SDN and Fog Computing and the new works in 2020 (i.e., [41] [40], [50][51][52][53], [58]).…”

Energy Efficient Computation Offloading Mechanism in Multi-Server Mobile Edge Computing—An Integer Linear Optimization Approach

“…Several edge servers are deployed near the mobile devices aiming at a significant reduction in latency, congestion avoidance, and prolonging the network lifetime. Several IoT devices offload the heavy computation workload to the MEC devices such as base stations, access points, and so forth [2]. Integrating EH and MEC techniques contribute to improving computation performance and open new possibilities for cloud computing [3,4].…”