Design and Implementation of LTE RRM With Switched LWA Policies

LTE-WLAN aggregation (LWA) combines the radio resources of LTE and WLAN, which takes the advantage of Wi-Fi's high availability and indoor coverage to provide better usage of both WLAN and LTE. In this mechanism, it is essential that the network should intelligently switch a data radio bearer (DRB) to utilize either LTE or Wi-Fi. This paper implements the radio resource management layer (RRM) for LWA and proposes two types of the switched LWA policies: the guaranteed bandwidth and the equal sharing policies. We measure the delay times of the LWA procedures, which indicate that the switched LWA policies can be implemented at the RRM with negligible overhead. We conduct emulation, simulation, and analytic analysis to evaluate the performance of the switched LWA policies. The beauty of the LWA policies is that the performance is not affected by the DRB holding time distribution. Our study indicates that switched LWA can effectively reduce the blocking probability of the LWA's DRBs.