QoE based SDN heterogeneous LTE and WLAN multi-radio networks for multi-user access

Abstract

The scarcity of the long term evolution (LTE) bandwidth and the increasing data demand call for more wireless local area networks (WLANs) to help the cellular offloading. A software-defined networking (SDN) based control approach is proposed to effectively utilize the heterogeneous LTE and WLAN radio bandwidth by operating the multi-radio interfaces simultaneously. The use of the deployed Wi-Fi access points (APs) for Internet access has been a common practice for most people, however, the total utility or the quality of experience (QoE) drops when users compete for a single Wi-Fi AP or there is no controller to aid them to allocate rates to each radio access technology (RAT). This problem will even aggravate when more APs are involved in wireless mobile networks. This paper investigates how heterogeneous resources should be coordinated and allocated to multi-user access of the LTE and Wi-Fi aggregation (LWA) network. The proposed application layer scheme can adjust the target users and resources adaptively based on estimated users states so that the total QoE attained by all users is maximized. The developed scheme can help the operator decide the associations of users to appropriate Wi-Fi APs and adaptively adjust rate allocations of each user on the associated Wi-Fi and LTE. The good performance and low complexity of the proposed scheme is validated in a network simulator (NS-3).