Novel Wi-Fi - LTE Real-Time Traffic Steering - First Field Measurement Results

A novel algorithm, real-time two-way traffic steering, has been developed to address the issue in mixed cellular-wireless deployments that current commercial terminals switch from cellular access to wireless access regardless of the expected bitrate in the wireless cell. In contrast to terminal-controlled traffic steering mechanisms, no changes on the terminal side are needed in order to benefit from the proposed algorithm. The algorithm was tested in an end-to-end test network and very promising results were obtained for both a single user and for multiple users. Two scenarios were considered: In the first scenario, real-time two-way traffic steering was demonstrated for one single moving user. Here the capability of selecting the best access was demonstrated. In the latter scenario, multiple users were moving together mimicking users arriving to and leaving from a train station. Here the load balancing capabilities of the algorithm were demonstrated and it was also seen that the pro-posed algorithm distributes the resources in a fair way between the users.