Intelligent traffic enforcement for LTE backhaul

Abstract

There has been a lot of research focusing on optimizing the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks performance. A large part of this research focused on how to optimize the LTE radio interface to efficiently distribute the scarce radio resources among the LTE users. Since LTE offers a diverse amount of services, the Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation is a major challenge. QoS is handled in LTE at different levels; the most important one is the radio scheduler. The QoS aware radio scheduler is designed to guarantee different service requirements. However, if the LTE radio interface is fully optimized towards QoS guarantees, what happen when the LTE transport network runs into congestion? Congestion can happen at any point in the network, and normally congested LTE backhaul tends to create large unfairness among the users, even among the ones with the same QoS class. The LTE transport congestion can occur at any router in the backhaul network. In this paper, we present two novel algorithms, which focus on the LTE transport congestion. The first algorithm is a congestion detection mechanism (CD) that identifies the transport network congestion as early as possible, and triggers the congestion control function. The second algorithm preserves and optimizes the QoS performance of each user over the transport to match the radio scheduler service differentiation, i.e., achieving fairness among the users in the same QoS demand and guaranteeing the enforced radio QoS weights for different service classes.