On the Potentials of Traffic Steering Techniques between HSDPA and LTE

In this paper traffic steering between a High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network and a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) network with different carrier frequencies is investigated. First, two traffic steering algorithms, relying on static network information, are assessed from a traffic theoretical point of view and numerically. Furthermore, numerical analysis of two traffic steering algorithms, relying on dynamic information such as user SINR and cell load, is also performed. It is shown that the dynamic traffic steering algorithms outperform the static methods in terms of end user performance. Finally, it is investigated how the LTE terminal penetration affects the performance of the proposed traffic steering algorithms. For low LTE terminal penetration all LTE capable terminals should be pushed to the LTE network, and for high LTE terminal penetration a more dynamic traffic steering scheme should be used.