LTE WLAN aggregation — SDN assisted: A seamless connectivity approach for heterogeneous networks

Network Offloading schemes play a vital role when there is a massive growth in the capacity of Next Generation Networks. The aggregation of LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) is meant to provide service with seamless connectivity for the User Equipment (UE). There are two major issues that have been identified in existing RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) based offloading scheme such as: i) it fails to provide better performance ii) it requires frequent reconnection for establishing dual connectivity. UE (User Equipment) based offloading approach requires a lot of signaling between UE and Radio access network and thus lacks in resource utilization and energy efficiency. Network based offloading approach needs a network specific entity. In the proposed LWA-SA (LTE WLAN Aggregation-SDN Assisted) which is an SDN (Software Defined Networking) based offloading scheme. In this, a controller keeps track of ongoing sessions after offloading. Here, an algorithm is used based on Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF) offloading scheme for the purpose of selecting an efficient Wi-Fi access point which increases the throughput and reduces the delay and also provides seamless connectivity to the UE.