An LTE-WiFi Spectrum Aggregation System for 5G Network: A Testbed
Khizar Abbas, Khan Talha Ahmed, Adeel Rafiq, Wang‐Cheol Song, Seung‐Joon Seok
Abstract
Nowadays, the continuous increase in the high data traffic demand and providing the different quality of services (QOS) to the customer is a very challenging task for all network operators. In the last few years, mobile data traffic is increased to a significant extent. 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 is increased the network capacity and provides better QoS to customers. In this article, we proposed and implement the LTE-WiFi aggregation system which is very similar to the 3GPP LWA system. Furthermore, the proposed system is integrated with the M-CORD platform which is SDN, NFV, and cloud-based open-source solutions for providing a 5G environment. The implementation of the proposed system is based on the OpenAirInterface OAI software-defined radio (SDR) platform where WLAN AP is directly connected to eNodeB. The aggregation of both technologies is done at the PDCP layer. Moreover, we test our proposed system with three kinds of policies for UDP and TCP traffic known as LTE only, WiFi only and LTE-WiFi aggregated. The experimental result shows that our proposed LTE-WiFi aggregated system gives better performance and provides high bandwidth as compared to single LTE.