Dual Mobile Data for Single Transmission Dual VoLTE Standby Devices

The current 4G and upcoming 5G technologies allow calls on both Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) in User Equipment (UE), calls on one SIM, and data on another SIM in simultaneous dual SIM operations due to their packet switched design. In such a setup, if a user who is already doing Uplink (UL) transmission of data on the first SIM (without loss of generality) accepts a call on the second SIM, the first SIM has to start sharing the transmitter with the second SIM as there is only one transmitter in a UE. Since sharing the transmitter involves losing a few transmission time intervals (TTIs) during switching the transmitter (releasing and acquiring back) and additional TTIs for Voice packet transmission and their retransmissions by the second SIM, the UL data throughput on the first SIM is degraded. To overcome this issue, we propose a UL and Downlink (DL) data re-routing mechanism in which the UL and DL mobile data of the first SIM is re-routed through the second SIM that is handling the voice call, avoiding sharing of the transmitter between SIMs. We show through simulations that the proposed mechanism significantly improves transmitter availability by 36% and 72% in poor channel conditions and 15% and 30% in good channel conditions with and without TTI bundling respectively.