Very Tight Coupling between LTE and Wi-Fi for Advanced Offloading Procedures

Xavier Lagrange (1, 2)

1 REOP - Réseaux d'opérateurs
2 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia

Wi-Fi access points are now widely deployed by customers or by the operators. This represents an interesting solution to offload the LTE networks. In this paper we propose a very-tight coupling solution between LTE and Wi-Fi, which can be used to enhance the offloading procedures. In this architecture PDCP (Packet Data Convergence Protocol) is used as the common layer between LTE and Wi-Fi and the security procedures defined for LTE are reused for Wi-Fi transmission. It is thus possible to use Wi-Fi transmissions even when a terminal is covered by a Wi-Fi access point for a short period. We describe the entities of this architecture, the protocol stack and describe how user packets are transmitted.

Mots clés: Heterogeneous wireless networks; LTE/EPC; WiFi; Protocole de signalisation; Radio Access Network

Domaines: Multimédia [cs.MM]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Xavier Lagrange. Very Tight Coupling between LTE and Wi-Fi for Advanced Offloading Procedures. WCNC 2014 : IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, Apr 2014, Istanbul, Turquie. pp.82 - 86, ⟨10.1109/WCNCW.2014.6934865⟩. ⟨hal-01167109⟩