Next generation cellular WiFi integration

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The ever-growing consumption of data by mobile device users is placing a strain on mobile networks, and as a result, system operators are continually making upgrades to their wireless wide area networks. With the increasing number of WiFi capable mobile devices and WiFi access becoming ubiquitous in homes, enterprises and retail locations, WiFi offload is an attractive option for network operators. While mobile cellular service providers are expecting mobile data traffic to increase by 11-fold over 2013-2018, mobile data is costly to provide, and in 2013, 45 percent of global mobile data traffic was offloaded. The emerging IEEE 802.11ac WiFi standard contains enhancements for better physical-layer support for multiple antennas via multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technology to enable, for example, wireless local area network (WLAN) access points (APs) to transmit packets simultaneously to multiple users at high rates. Not only does 802.11ac support multi-user MIMO, there are also potential media access (MAC) network protocol efficiency improvements possible through both frame aggregation and multipath transmission control protocols (TCP). This project is concerned with developing the capabilities enabled by emerging WiFi standards and proprietary performance enhancements to offload wide area mobile cellular networks. Ericsson, a world-leading developer of basestation equipment with an established R&D presence in Canada, is the industrial research partner. The proposed research goals are to investigate improvements in WiFi throughput, focusing on: (1) improving point-to-point WiFi PHY performance, enhanced by recent IEEE 802.11ac, by developing novel adaptation methods for MIMO transmission in combination with frame aggregation, temporal prediction, and multi-user MIMO, (2) multiple AP coordination of user sensing capability for dense deployments and (3) WiFi and cellular network integration by investigating network/fountain coded packet transmission from gateway to end user via parallel cellular and WiFi links that are multipath TCP compatible.